Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 4, 1910

_Making the People Good_

In these days when pulpit politicians are saying so much about the duty of the state to regulate morals, and promote the religious interests of the people, it is refreshing to read such a plain, forcible, and sensible statement as that which comes from Mayor Whitlock, of Toledo, Ohio. It seems that he was elected on a “reform” platform, and, as the reforms did not progress as rapidly as a class of clergymen believed they ought to, these clergymen called recently on Mayor Whitlock to urge upon him his responsibility for the enforcement of certain laws. The mayor promised to consider their protest and admonition, and later gave out publicly the following statement as to his attitude toward their demands. He said:—

Men are not made good by legal declaration or by official action; they are not good because of the fear of policemen or of the pains and penalties of the law. They are good when they follow the best and highest impulses of their souls; goodness is developed from within, and there is no other way by which any one can become good.

The mayor has set forth statements of fact which ought to be patent even to the political clergymen. The passage of laws may hold the immoral in restraint, but can not put morality into an immoral heart. The preacher who occupies his time in seeking to obtain the enactment of certain laws, or the election of certain men to places of political preferment, is wasting just so much of his time. The business of the preacher is with the souls and the hearts of men, and these can never be reached by any sort of legislation. Time spent by a preacher of the gospel in securing the election of a man to public office might have been spent in a much greater work—the work of saving a human soul from perdition. The mayor’s declaration that men are good when they follow the best and highest impulses of their souls, is a terse declaration of a great truth, but against that truth every advocate of religious legislation necessarily sets his face as a flint. Wherever religious legislation is in vogue, the people are not permitted to follow the best and highest impulses of their souls, but must follow the impulses and commands of some one else, even in religious things, and this makes of them hypocrites, and ruins character.