p. 1 | The Constitution Is Not a Theocracy

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 31, 1889

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 4, No. 27.

The Constitution Is Not a Theocracy

It is ridiculous for any one to say that the fathers of the Constitution had any idea of establishing an atheistic nation. Almost all of them were professing Christians, but they felt that their business was to construct a civil government—a republic, not a theocracy. To have introduced the name of God into the Constitution as the head of the Nation, and then to have left his relations and his honors undefined, nor provisions made for his worship and his support on the part of the Nation, would have introduced a subject of perpetual contention in the body politic, because it would have stood as an anomaly in the great instrument. The logical sequence must have been the establishment of a State religion of some sort as a legacy of perpetual strife.—Rev. Dr. Armitage, Pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, New York.