Trusting in the Bible’s depictions of the unified church, and hopeful in Christ’s own prayer for the unity of His disciples, Nevin insisted (Catholic Unity) that the fragmentation of the church could not possibly be permanent:

“Can any one suppose, that the order of things which now prevails in the Christian world, in the view before us, is destined to be perpetual and final? Does it not lie in the very conception of the Church, that these divisions should pass away, and make room for the reign at last of catholic unity and love? . . . We are bound therefore to expect that this unity will not always be wanting. The hour is coming though it be not now, when the prayer of Christ that his Church may be one, will appear gloriously fulfilled in its actual character and state, throughout the whole world.”

And this hope has particular implications for Protestantism. Disruption and fragmentation was a natural product of the Reformation, but the fact that this disunity persists and spreads means that the Reformation has not yet come to its fullness. A fragmenting Protestantism must, he implies, give way to a Catholic Protestantism.

In Nevin’s own words: “If sects as they now appear have been the necessary fruit of the Reformation, then must we say that the Reformation, being as we hold it to be from God, has not yet been conducted forward to its last legitimate result, in this respect What it has divided, it must have power again in due time to bring together and unite. Our protestant Christianity cannot continue to stand in its present form.”

Only a Catholic Protestantism can flourish in the future, because “a Church without unity can neither conquer the world, nor sustain itself.”