Church and State | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 23, 1889

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 4, No. 39.

Church and State.

THE NEW Mexico constitutional convention, now in session at Santa Fe, has been addressed in an open letter by Archbishop Salpointe, defining the Roman Catholic position on education, and appealing to the convention to shape the new constitution in accordance with it. If the request should be acceded to, the constitution of New Mexico would be radically different from that of any existing constitution in the United States, either State or territorial, says the Denver News. It would be a radical innovation upon the spirit of the national organic law, and upon the practice of the respective States. The archbishop wants an association of Church and State, by which the State shall provide for religious instructions in the public schools, to be supported from the school fund, supplemented by general taxation. He cites the Canadian and European plans to illustrate his meaning. The proposition is deadly to a principle that underlies this free government, and that is essential to its perpetuity. The alliance of Church and State it contemplates is unfavorable to civil liberty and to spiritual progress. Our present system has worked for more than a century with better results than any other known to history. Would it be wise to transform the government in a matter of vital importance by borrowing an educational system from Canada or from Europe? The Canadian method has pitted one province of the dominion against the rest in a war of treasonable bigotry and religious hate. What European country do we care to select as an example in this particular? Are not the superior advantages of the United States in giving humanity a chance conceded by the oppressed of every land? Does not the flow of immigration, aggregating more than seven millions, affirmatively answer the question? Why, then, seek a radical change in the government? Will anyone question that the archbishop asks for a fundamental change? There is no better authority on this point than Judge Cooley, who, in his “Constitution Limitations,” enumerates among those things which are not lawful under any of the American institutions, “the compulsory support, by taxation or otherwise, of religious instruction. Not only is no one denomination to be favored at the expense of the rest, but all support of religious instruction must be entirely voluntary.”

With such a revolution backward as Archbishop Salpointe would provide for in the constitution of New Mexico, the territory would not stand one-half the chance of getting into the Union that Utah would, with polygamy in its most rampant stage; and what is more, the admission of Utah with polygamy would not involve a tithe of the danger to the nation that would be inseparable from the archbishop’s proposition, should it be adopted. This country has a moral force to overcome polygamy in a single commonwealth, but the sacrifice of the public-school system in only one State, by recognizing an alliance that has proved a blighting curse to the human race, would be an entering wedge that would stimulate a controversy of the most wretched kind that can afflict a people. The archbishop’s idea is imported. It is not American, but is hostile to American liberty. In the several constitutions lately adopted by the northern Territories it is not heard of.

Concessions have been made touching the public schools for nearly fifty years, and even now there is an overwhelming spirit of fairness that is

willing and anxious to protect the rights of all. But the line has been drawn against the first step that points against their disintegration and destruction. Nine-tenths of the American people will sustain our system of popular education intact, and the proportion will never be diminished. Time, progress, and civilization are all with the majority in this case. The contest that has been plainly outlined on the school question involves alienations and antagonisms among the people of a common country, who have hitherto lived happily together and enjoyed a degree of prosperity unequaled in the annals of time. Under our common schools peoples of many nations and various creeds have become Americans, brothers in patriotism, sincerely respecting each other’s religious convictions, but free from the most pitiable sentiment that ever dishonored manhood,—religious bigotry and narrow intolerance. Moreover, under this system, all forms of religion have evinced a vitality that they possess nowhere else. But the mandate has gone forth that there must be strife. It is due to a force that in the interest of society has been repeatedly suppressed by leading nations, and that was once distinguished as a danger by the papal authority, a prohibition that lasted for nearly forty years. The same force now controls the destinies of the church, and in undertaking to stem the tide of intellectual progress it has shattered Catholicism in Europe, aggravated the causes that turned Italy against the Vatican, and nearly finished the process of making France infidel. It now assumes to revolutionize this government by a union of Church and State for educational purposes, a step in the direction of ecclesiastical ascendancy.—Hoof and Horn, the Stockman’s Journal of Arizona.