Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · January 7, 1868

OUR LAND AND ITS RELIGION.

[Bro. Smith: I clip this article from the Northwestern Christian Advocate, an organ of the Episcopal Methodists. As straws show which way the wind blows, does not this show that the crisis is near at hand when an image will be made to the beast? J. A. Gregory.]

The Northwestern of last week felt called upon to enter a solemn protest against the moral tone of the daily press of this city. We have repeatedly borne testimony to the intellectual strength and remarkable enterprise of our city papers. No journals this side of New York city equal them in these regards. Yet our regret is profound and overwhelming that they persist in assailing the great principles of Christian order and faith. We have pointed out the super-serviceable haste manifested in the service of a class of foreigners, mostly of German nationalities, who have caused it to be understood that their political suffrages can only be secured by a party consent to abolish the Christian Sabbath of this nation, and opening unrestricted traffic in intoxicating liquors. We have given our solemn warning that this demand will alienate the support of Christian men. The experiment was tried in New York. To please a clamorous German-infidel element, a disgraceful concession was made, and the election was lost to the Republican party. Our advices as to the outraged sentiment of the religious population of the State, the indignation of laity and clergy, of the men who voted, and paid and worked during the rebellion, enabled us, before the election, to predict the result as inevitable. In Iowa the position was reversed. The disaffected lager-beer men denounced the party and withdrew. The moral sense of religious men was appealed to, and the State was carried by an overwhelming majority, and that when it had to overcome the evil prestige of a previous unpopular administration. We cannot, perhaps, induce party-leaders to see that religious men are not to be bought and sold like meat in the shambles; we may not be able to stop them in their course of folly, but we warn them now, and once for all, that religious men will not submit to dictation; that they will not stand still and see the institutions of this land destroyed; that they are not owned by party-cliques, and that they mean to maintain the Christian Sabbath, and to withstand the encroachments of the rum-power; that they will do this if they are compelled to sunder every party tie, to go for the time being into a minority, and, driven to the wall, stand, defending the faith once delivered to the saints. We repeat this warning, and caution the leaders in the anti-Sunday, pro-liquor crusade, that we speak after due consideration, and with a knowledge of the sentiments of Protestant churches. We warn them further, that in the contest for the Sabbath it may so fall out that Roman Catholicism in America and Protestantism will be found side by side, for neither of these will consent to be marshaled by German atheists. We warn them once more, that in such a division, a mighty division of the German element of this land will be with us. These German whip-crackers, who assume the airs of plantation slave-drivers, have no mortgage on the brains, the hearts, the consciences of the thinking, industrious Germans of the country, whether Protestant or Catholic.

The anti-Sabbath crusade is an effort to overthrow the Christian religion, and this is the light in which all Christian men should look at it.

This is a Christian country. The foundations were laid in Christian faith and self-denial, and again and again, in the most solemn manner, has Christianity been recognized as the religion of the country—not as a creed, not as a form, not as something to be established and sustained by legal tithes, yet as the fundamental, essential, religious spirit of the nation.

Said Judge Story, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:

“One of the beautiful traits of our municipal jurisprudence is that Christianity is part of the common law, from which it seeks its sanction of its rights, and by which it endeavors to regulate its doctrines. And notwithstanding the specious objection of one of our distinguished statesmen, the boast is as true as it is beautiful. * It repudiates every act done in violation of its duties of perfect obligation. It pronounces

illegal every contract offensive to its morals. It recognizes with profound humility its holy days and festivals, and obeys them as dies non juridici. It still attaches to persons believing in its divine authority the highest degree of competency as witnesses.”

The chief state courts have in various ways recognized the same thing, have hailed Christianity as the Alma Mater of the country and its various commonwealths. In 1824, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reviewed the subject thoroughly on a trial for blasphemy.—See Sergeant & Rawle’s R., p. 394, &c.

“Christianity is and always has been a part of the common law of Pennsylvania; not Christianity founded on particular religious tenets; not Christianity with an established Church, and titles and spiritual courts; but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men.”

It quotes the first legislative act of the State, “The Great Law,” and comments at length, and we have only space for brief fragments:

“This wise legislature framed this wise legislation for a Christian country and a Christian people.” “Thus is the Christianity of the common law incorporated into the great law of Pennsylvania, and thus it is irrefragably proved that the laws and institutions of this State are built on the foundation of reverence for Christianity.” “Christianity is part of the common law of this State. It is not proclaimed by the commanding voice of any human superior, but expressed in the calm, mild accents of customary law. Its foundations are broad, and strong, and deep; they are laid in the authority, the interest, the affections of the people. Waiving all questions of hereafter, it is the purest system of morality, the firmest auxiliary and only stable support of all human laws.”

Omitting additional quotations from this opinion, turn to the decision of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. It was pronounced by Judge Parsons, an eminent jurist, one worthy to be accounted peer to Marshall, Story, and Kent, and will be found an unanswerable answer to the objections against any recognition of Christianity by the legislature. Chancellor Kent, in the appeal of the case of the State of New York vs. Ruggles, on conviction for blasphemy, laid down similar doctrine, and said, “Christianity, in its enlarged sense, as a religion revealed and taught in the Bible, is not unknown to our law.” In 1861, the Supreme Court of New York sustained and repeated the former decisions of the courts in that and other States in favor of Christianity. In considering more directly the “Sunday question,” we may refer to this decision at greater length, and will give but few extracts. The decision was rendered at the February term, 1861, in the case of Gustav Lindenmuller, Plaintiff in Error, convicted under the act of April, 1860, of giving dramatic representations on Sunday.

“Christianity is part of the common law of this State in the qualified sense that it is entitled to respect and protection as the acknowledged religion of the people. The right of unconstrained religious belief, and the proper expression of it, is guaranteed to all; but it must be exercised with strict regard to the equal rights of all others; and when belief or unbelief leads to acts which interfere with the rights of conscience of those who represent the religion of the country as established—not by law, but by immemorial consent and usage—these acts may be restrained by legislation. If Christianity were established by law, it would be a civil or political institution, which it is not. It is in fact the religion of the people, and ever has been, and has been so recognized from the first by constitutional conventions, legislatures, and courts of justice.”

Running through the State papers, the legislative proceedings, the judicial forms, and executive proclamations of our Republic is the recognition of Christianity as the religion of the people, “not ordained by law,” but accepted as such from the beginning. Under the great seal of the Continental Congress, were sent out declarations, praying through “the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ to obtain forgiveness and pardon for sins; that pure and undefiled religion may be universally diffused;” “that vice and irreligion may be banished, and virtue and piety established by grace;” “that the nation may be made a holy nation, and that the religion of our divine Redeemer, with all its benign influences, may cover the earth as the waters do the sea.”

The founders of the Republic held such a faith as this. It is as dear to their sons. They see that war is to be made upon it by moving against its institutions. They are sorry, but not despairing. They will be prudent, but inflexible. They will hate no jot of their privileges as American citizens at the dictation of a handful of men from over the sea, who hide the paucity of their numbers by effrontery, clamor and assumption. They will, “as far as lieth in them, live peaceably with all men,” but they will not give up Christian institutions. They will not consent that the agencies which have made this nation great and powerful, shall be overthrown.