In the first place, sects are confusing in that, while necessarily bad as factions, they are _associated_ more or less with good. Many of them in their origin followed reform movements which apparently had divine sanction and were progressive in Christianity, and many of them have upheld truth which when preached was productive of good and brought salvation results. But here it should be noted, that whatever of salvation work has been accomplished has been directly by the Spirit of God in individuals, quite apart from any sectarian agency. It must be said, too, that whatever has resulted from Christian endeavor or influence and expenditure of means, whether in home or foreign lands, would have been in greater degree had the church back of these efforts been one spiritual whole instead of many sectarian divisions. So, when we come to apply analysis to this question of sects, we find that they are in no sense good. That they are called churches is but the part of confusion, for in the popular mind and in actual practise it tends to identify sects with the divine church, whereas in Scripture church always means something other than sects. Bodies that are differentiated by the isms of men are not, and never can be, Scripturally churches, for except in the local geographical sense the church takes no plural form. There is a distinction between the true people of God as constituting the divine church and the human institutions called churches that have divided them and placed them in unnatural and unscriptural relations. The true church of God, by virtue of comprising all the saved and therefore being a unit, places sects in comparison only as false churches. A commentator truthfully remarks, "False Christendom divided into very many sects is truly Babylon, that is, confusion." (Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown's Commentary.) Thus sects, because they are a hindrance to proper Christian activity and because they present a spectacle of religious confusion, professing to be churches when they can only be false, are bad. This is no disparagement of the many noble men and women of God who have been connected with sects and have gone on to their heavenly reward, whose accomplished good was from the divine source and not from the sectarian. They may have honestly loved their sect, but in this they were honestly misplacing their love. It was the religious association with their fellow Christians that they loved, and this, had they only known it, was not enhanced but rather hindered by the sectarian distinction. They will not find these distinctions in heaven. If they really loved the sect, they had to leave that love behind, for it could not be included with such Christian excellence as entitled them to heaven. Thus our good parents and grandparents and the long line of reformers and Christian worthies receive their heavenly reward quite independent of the sectarian institutions that divided them here. EVIL OF SECTS IN POSITIVE LIGHT