Sunday Laws and Church-State Union
SUNDAY-LAW advocates persistently assert that they do not want a union of Church and State; that nothing could be further from their designs or desires. Nevertheless the logic of their position compels some of their leading spirits to confess the truth. An utterance of the Rev. T. H. Tatlow at the Missouri Sabbath Convention is an evidence of this:— “The party of carnal policy protests, and cries out that this is uniting Church and State. The Christian replies: It is indeed a union, but limited, and applies only so far as two separate jurisdictions—the one spiritual and primary and the other secular and secondary—exercises each one its own appropriate authority, within its own individual province, to secure a two-fold good to the two-fold life of man.” And what is such a union, but a union of Church and State? And if the spiritual jurisdiction is primary, must it not dominate the civil? That was exactly the state of affairs in Rome in the palmiest day of the Papacy.