Reformed Episcopal Church guilty of the schism, the party which separates and goes out? or the party that forces the separation, by making binding on the conscience what Christ has not made binding?" Rather than characterize this as schism, Bishop Cummins and his fellow reformers portrayed themselves as providing a Protestant, Anglican identity under which there could be a 'closer union of all Evangelical Christendom.' "The Reformed Episcopal Church would be what the Protestant Episcopal Church might have become had it not been paralyzed by the Tractarian virus." The term "Reformed" was never intended to denote any Calvinistic sense of Reformed theology, but
Reformed Episcopal Church his own dreams of ecumenicity with racial exclusivism. The Reformed Episcopal Seminary itself is one of the first, if not the first, seminaries to be racially inclusive. The founders of the Reformed Episcopal Church professed a faith rooted in the English Reformation, regarding the Holy Scripture as the Word of God, and accepting the authority of the Nicene, Apostles' and Athanasian Creeds, the first four ecumenical councils, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (in the form published in 1801 by the Protestant Episcopal Church), and the "Declaration of Principles of the Reformed Episcopal Church". They emphasized the Protestant, Reformed, Evangelical and