The system is constitutionally tyrannical. Every sect pretends to make men free. But only consider what sects are; self-constituted ecclesiastical organizations, called forth ordinarily by private judgment and caprice, and devoted to some one-sided Christian interest, under perhaps the most superficial and narrow view; educated polemically to a certain fanatical zeal for their own separatistic honor and credit; and bent on impressing their own “image and superscription,” on all that fall beneath their ghostly power. Are these the circumstances that favor liberality and independence? The man who puts his conscience in the keeping of a sect, is no longer free. It might as well be in the keeping of a Roman priest… The very last place in which to look for true spiritual emancipation, the freedom of a divinely, self-poised catholic mind, is the communion of sects.

John Williamson Nevin, “The Sect System,” Second Article, The Mercersberg Review, November 1849