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Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · July 24, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 29

National Reform in Brazil.

THE Roman Catholic bishops have issued a letter to their clergy and faithful, which they have distributed throughout the republic. It contains eighty-six large octavo pages, and is divided into three parts, as follows:—

1. What is our opinion in regard to the separation of Church and State, which has been decreed by the provisional government?

2. What is our opinion in regard to the freedom of worship given to the sects?

3. What is our duty in regard to the new situation of the church in Brazil?

In the introduction to their letter, the bishops say:—

What will become of you, dear people of Brazil, if you should also be deprived of your faith, and be left without God; without God in the family, without God in the schoolhouse, without God in the government and public offices, without God in the last moments of life and in death, yea, even in the grave without God?

We want individuals, families, and society to keep faithfully the Decalogue, which observance, as Le Play says, is the secret of the stability and well-being of families, of the regeneration of races, of the honor and splendor of great, prosperous nations.

This has the genuine National Reform ring. The idea is that unless the government fosters religion the people are, to some extent, deprived of it; the nation is godless, the schools are godless, and the people are without God even in death! This is simply saying that every man's personal relation of faith and obedience to God is dependent upon the action of the government under which he happens to live; if the government is Christian the citizen may be Christian; if the government is pagan the citizen must also be pagan! It is an appeal to prejudice instead of reason. All can see how absurd such an idea is when advocated by Romanists in Brazil; but it is not one whit more absurd than is the same idea among Protestants in this country.