The great Puritan movement against conformity to an established church settled forever the great principle that any company of earnest Christians have a right to form a church _when conditions justify it_. But we have seen in this country, as nowhere else in the world, the absurd extremes of this great liberty. Sects have been formed to maintain the wickedness of buttons and the piety of hooks and eyes; and for many another tenet almost as petty. Churches of "Come-Outers," "Heavenly Recruits" and "The Hephzibah Faith" appeal to the fancy of theological epicures. Colonies of "Zionites" and "The Holy Ghost and Us Society" have been established, mainly for the exploiting of some shrewd fanatic and his pious fraud. With 188 sects now in America, we have come to the point when sensible people have a right to insist that an unnecessary church is a curse to a community. Its influence is sadly divisive. Its maintenance is a needless tax. It embodies, not true piety, but pharisaic selfishness. The community has a right to keep it out for self-protection. The social consciousness has now developed enough to teach us that the right of individuals to form endless churches must be curtailed, for the general welfare, exactly as other individual rights, such as carrying pistols, public expectoration, working young children, and riding bicycles on city sidewalks, have to be surrendered in a social age. Thus social cooperation is displacing individualism and religious cranks should not be immune to the law of progress. To insist upon individual rights to form a new sect or to burden an overchurched community with a needless church is a grave social injustice and a sin against the Kingdom of God. A small village in South Dakota applied the referendum to the question whether they should have a Methodist or a Congregational church. The plan was proposed by the village Board of Trade. It was entered into by the whole community as a sensible proposition and the losers accepted the verdict, under pressure of public opinion. The village has but one church to-day. When denominational leaders agree to force no church upon such a community as this, and to help support no church with home missionary funds where it is neither needed nor wanted, the cause of religion in small communities will be greatly advanced. Fortunately some of the larger churches are frankly accepting this principle and are working with a large measure of comity and denominational reciprocity. _The New Christian Statesmanship_ For many years the leading churches in Maine have had an "Interdenominational Comity Commission" which has kept out unnecessary churches, and has reduced the number in overchurched communities by a sort of denominational reciprocity. Other states in New England and the West have adopted the plan, and now the Home Mission Council has recently organized on a national scale, in the interest of all Protestant churches.