Again, it is thought that "sects are a necessity until holiness more generally prevails." "Thorough and wide-spread holiness would soon destroy denominations." Sects and holiness are antagonistic to each other. This truth is clearly implied in the above remarks. The fire of true holiness burns up all the fences that Satan has placed between the saints. And shall we defeat this its real mission, by not lifting up the sword of the Lord against sects, and attempt to abolish the evil, until holiness prevails more extensively? That is the same as saying that we should make no attack on unholiness until holiness gains a certain degree of ascendancy. Yea, it provides that we should give place to the devil in the church to destroy holiness, until the church becomes more holy. These are no trifling words. It is a solemn fact that adherence in different denominations is the devil's wedge, whereby the unity of the Spirit, so perfectly procured in the grace of prefect love, is again destroyed. Party names, party creeds, and party spirits almost of necessity go together; and the natural return of this spirit, because of membership in a fragmentary church, takes more souls off of God's altar than do everything else together. Let sects alone until holiness prevails! What a device of the enemy! How can we expect to bring forth permanent fruits into holiness, if we allow the plowshare of God's truth to slip over this fallow ground of sin? Sects are the devil's "high places" in the land, the groves of his own planting, and gods that he has set up to corrupt Israel, and "provoke God." How many of the kings Jehovah complains of because they did not, like Josiah, "purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places and the groves" (2 Chron. 34:3)! Beware that we partake not of their sins. Of Azariah it is said that "he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord ... save that the high places were not removed.... And the Lord smote the king [Azariah] so that he was a leper unto the day of his death" (2 Kings 15:3-5). Says W. H. Starr (a conscientious Presbyterian minister) after quoting 1 Cor. 1:10-13 in his Discourses on Sectarianism: "It would seem as if no man could read these words of the great apostle without vividly seeing that party divisions among the people of Christ were, in his view, a most astounding evil. 'Is Christ divided,' he says, that ye who are all his, and who have been 'baptized by one Spirit' should be sundered one from the other by party names? "And he adjures them in the most solemn manner, he beseeches them by an appeal the most sacred that words could utter, even by the name of Christ, as it were for his sake, and for his bleeding cause, to forsake these pernicious ways, and to be perfectly joined together in the same mind." Hear what this author thinks of promoting holiness over these "high places," or sect walls.