Disunity: Passions Trumping Duty

Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation (1680):

Although the Christian religion doth lay the greatest obligations on mankind to peace and unity, by the strictest commands, the highest examples, and the most prevailing arguments, yet so much have the passions and interests of men oversway'd the sense of their duty, that as nothing ought to be more in our wishes, so nothing seems more remote from our hopes, than the universal peace of the Christian world. (p. 1)

--quoted in Henry Knapp, 'John Owen, on Schism and the Nature of the Church,' WTJ 72 (2010): 333