Schaff was particularly burdened by the sectarian spirit he detected within American Protestantism. He spent many pages railing against what he called the two primary “diseases” of Protestantism: rationalism and sectarianism.10 He felt that many Protestants, especially in America, had overreacted against the excess of Rome: As Catholicism toward the close of the Middle Ages settled into a character of hard, stiff objectivity, incompatible with the proper freedom of the individual subject . . . so Protestantism has been carried aside, in later times, into the opposite error of a loose
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It is a disease in Protestantism to have so many denominations.
