Baptists and Religious Liberty.
We can but wish that the following words by Rev. J. Herndon Garnett, editor of the Herald of Truth, the leading Baptist paper of this coast, were true of all Baptists. In the Herald of October 9 Mr. Garnett says:— “Americans are constantly tempted to forget their birthright, religious liberty. Upon one pretext or other, there are good people ever and anon arising who tell us of some legislation which should be effected to operate in favor of religion. This to them is ample cause for action. The Jesuitical policy, ‘The end justifies the means,’ is wonderfully human. These misguided, but well-meaning people, appeal to Christian voters and patriots along the religious line, and think thereby to touch the most powerful sentiment, and arouse to action the conscience of Christendom. Just here eternal vigilance and wide-awake discrimination are all-important. The end here must never justify the means. There is to us no end possible to be reached by legislative enactment, which would be worth the surrender of this American, Christ-given principle of religious freedom. This is a boon which was bought with blood, on whose early cradle the ashes of our Christian ancestors fell, and whose birth-throes were the beginning of the freest and grandest government which the world has yet seen. “Baptists, peculiarly, love to remember that the seed of this principle in the soil of the Old World and the New was watered with the blood, and suffered the cruel imprisonment, of some of their best and bravest sires. They cannot forget this. Neither can they forget the eternal oath which they have taken that the liberty wherein they stand must to the end of time be guaranteed to every member of the human race, as far as in them lies, and so help them God. “With this freedom come many perils, dangers which would be largely averted in a sterner governmental structure. All liberty has its dangers. The liberty to walk given to the child is the liability to fall. The danger to the captive set free is that he may fall into more galling chains. But because of the perils of freedom, we do not lose our love for liberty.” The writer might have added, “Nor is liberty the less necessary to development because of the perils which necessarily accompany it.” The proper office of civil government is to protect the rights of all; to this end it forbids those acts which trench upon the rights of others, not because such acts are immoral, but because they are uncivil.