A Timely Utterance

A Timely Utterance.

By Edwin R. Palmer

“We recognize also God’s good hand upon us in the Constitution which for the century past has been the law of our national life. The world may be challenged to point to a public document which gives better evidence that its framers were inspired and guided by a wisdom beyond their own. It would have better suited a few literalists if the divine name had been inserted somewhere, anywhere, if so be that in some conventional and perfunctory way the divine being might have had due recognition. But as God is in nature in its abounding vitality, in its exquisite beauty and perfect harmony, a thousand times more impressively than if his name had been spelled out in the rock and bellowed out in the thunder, so God is in the Constitution in that reticent reverence which does not parade his titles in set phrase, but does put his love of justice and of mercy, his care for the rights of the weak and the duties of the strong, into every article and section and clause of it. Most significant to us in the retrospect of it is the fact that slavery in those days of its power could get no direct recognition in the Constitution, but that in this august presence it stands a marked and guilty thing, ashamed of its own nature. Significant also in face of the history of State religions is the provision that ‘there shall be no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ and that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.’ Thus did our fathers render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Thus has religion in America escaped the ‘fatal donation of Constantine,’ and thus has the word of God had free course and been glorified.”