The Orange Order's "mission statement", as published in a widely circulated leaflet last year, contains three sentences.
The second of these defines the order as "exclusively an association of those who are attached to the religion of the Reformation, and will not admit into its brotherhood those whom an intolerant spirit leads to persecute, injure, or upbraid any man on account of his religious opinions."
Even for many within the order, the events provoked by Drumcree have undermined that fundamental principle in a way no weasel words about the "peaceful" nature of the protest at the Portadown church can disguise.
"I am deeply, deeply saddened. I think the Orange Order is in the process of destroying itself," says one distinguished senior Orangeman. "This is not the Orangeism I grew up with."
He represents that old-fashioned, genuinely Christian section of the order which believes that its religious raison etre d'etre as a body which unites Protestants in defence of Protestantism is being endangered by recent extremist political stances.
He was particularly upset at the blockade by the County Antrim Orangemen - "who have caved in completely to the Spirit of Drumcree group" - of Dunloy on Tuesday night. He wondered how an equivalent Protestant village would have felt if it had come under similar siege by republicans.
Such people see the Spirit of Drumcree group as the embodiment
of what another senior Orangeman calls the "thuggish" element which has come to prominence in the past few years. Its leader, Mr Joel Patton, makes no secret of his desire to see the 1998 Drumcree crisis destroying David Trimble, the Assembly and the Belfast Agreement at one go.
Ironically, when the Portadown Orangemen called a press conference yesterday to deny this intention, their denial was crucially undermined by the presence in the room of a host of anti-agreement politicians; people including Willie Ross, Nigel Dodds and the Rev Willie McCrea.
Pro-agreement unionist politicians and Orangemen who have come to Drumcree report a hostile reception. One was told this week he was "as welcome as Gerry Adams".
But there is a further and deeper worry for many respectable Orange leaders. They see the Spirit of Drumcree group as dangerously close to ultra-sectarian groups like those behind the Ballymena church picket, and to paramilitary groups like the LVF and rogue UVF elements. The DUP of the Rev Ian Paisley, a harasser of the Orange Order since he was forced to leave it over 40 years ago, are never far away either.
One Orange leader expressed alarm at the sight of UVF men trying to take over the stewarding of a recent parade in his peaceful and religiously mixed village, and at the welcome they received from local Orangemen.
Meanwhile, the order's central leadership has never been weaker. Despite claims that Portadown's lodges have grown in response to four years of Drumcree crises, the organisation as a whole probably has little more than half the number of 100,000 paid-up members it used to boast. The great majority of middle class unionists now see Orange Order membership as beneath them, and Drumcree-inspired violence on the streets does nothing to reverse this trend.
One result is that local lodges are increasingly dependent on "kickthe-pope" bands and other tough young camp followers to make up the numbers at parades, with an inevitable increased risk of sectarian violence.
The leadership's weakness is personified in the figures who have emerged at its head in recent years. The Grand Master, Robert Saulters, is a decent but indecisive man who swims with the tide. Although he and his fellow-leaders were praised for last year's last-minute abandonment of four contentious routes in the face of predictions of dire consequences from the RUC Chief Constable, it was actually the four districts involved who made that difficult decision.
The Grand Secretary, John McCrea - who sees himself as the main power-broker at Orange headquarters - is a failed unionist politician.
Such men were no match for the well-organised lobby led by Mr Patton. Despite Mr Saulters's re-election as grand master last December, Mr Patton's demand for a tougher leadership stand on parades has effectively been conceded. Shortly afterwards the new Grand Orange Lodge "strategy committee" was set up, with a membership drawn from the officer body and a representative from each of the North's county organisations, plus Belfast.
In the absence of the Grand Orange Lodge's ruling central committee (which has not met since early June) this body is now running the show at Drumcree. One of its spokesmen seems to be David McNarry, a maverick political activist and self-publicist who has been involved in unionist "ginger groups" since the 1970s, and whose statement made the headlines yesterday. Surprisingly, he was in favour of the Belfast Agreement, although clearly none of his fellow committee members are.
The divisions in the Orange family can only widen as David Trimble and his colleagues work behind the scenes to try to find a way out of the Drumcree impasse. Already Portadown's hard-line district master, Harold Gracey, so prominent last Sunday, has faded into the background in what may be an attempt by local leaders like Dennis Watson and the Rev William Bingham to present a more flexible public face.
Whoever puts a face on it, Drumcree Four looks like being another unmitigated public relations disaster for the Orange Order. It has many decent and honourable men in its ranks. There have been courageous attempts to reach local agreements in places like Derry, Dromore, Co Tyrone, and Newtownbutler, Co Fermanagh - most of them, probably not coincidentally, west of the Bann, where Protestant minorities have learned to live with their Catholic neighbours.
Some of those decent men are frankly appalled at what has been happening in recent days. "I believe in the principles of Orangeism. But it's the practice which has become extreme," said one yesterday.
"There are no key figures any more. The people in office are not giving leadership. Locally, people do their own thing. It's a mess," he went on. Portadown is a case in point, with insignificant figures like the so-called local "press officer", David Jones, making daily statements to the media.
County and district masters who have more moderate views often feel they have to keep quiet for fear of the Spirit of Drumcree group and other extemists. "You don't say anything against them in case you get booed off the platform", one Orangeman recalls a county grand master saying.
Another says: "Thirty years of a vicious murder campaign, which started off as a mild form of civil unrest, has damaged the psyche of Northern Protestants terribly. In the eyes of some, it now seems to justify equally damnable attitudes - one evil produces another. If there's a united Ireland, it won't be because anyone has won a victory, but because of the divisions in unionism and Orangeism."