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Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · October 2, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 39

A Lesson From Paine.

INFIDELS of the present day profess to believe that bigotry and intolerance are inseparable from Christianity, that it is indeed part and parcel of Christianity. But they should learn better than this, even from their patron saint, Thomas Paine. In his “Rights of Man,” Paine says:—

All religions are, in their nature, mild and benign, and united with principles of morality. . . . How is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant? By engendering the State with the Church, a sort of mule animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called the Church established by law. . . . The Inquisition in Spain does not proceed from the religion originally professed, but from this mule animal engendered between the Church and State.

And again, of governments established by force, Paine says:—

Governments thus established last as long as the power to support them lasts; but that they might avail themselves of every engine in their favor, they united fraud to force, and set up an idol which they called divine right, and which, in imitation of the Pope who affects to be spiritual and temporal, and in contradiction to the founder of the Christian religion, twisted itself afterward into an idol of another shape, called Church and State.

Paine, infidel though he was, knew full well, and was man enough to acknowledge it, that the doctrine of Church and State was not Christian doctrine in any proper sense of the word, and it would be well if his disciples of the present day had equal discernment, and as great candor.