Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · April 9, 1891

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 6, No. 15

The Reason Why.

THERE are several reasons why, in our judgment, the clergy should not take an active part in political organization; even if it be dubbed non-partisan. They are not often skillful organizers of practical movements. Their function is to teach truth, not to conduct affairs; and while occasionally the same man is equally good at both, more frequently the man who drops the first function to undertake the second, drops a higher for a lower office, and he who undertakes to fulfill both fulfills neither. The American people are jealous of the interference of the clergy in political administration. The attempt to carry on the State by the Church has been very thoroughly tried in the Old World, and the success of the experiment has not been such as to encourage a repetition of it in the New World. Cardinals have not purified statecraft in France, nor have bishops sanctified the House of Lords in England. Ministers are but men, and when they drop the vantage ground which their profession gives them for quiet and unselfish reflection and enter the environment of other men, they become much like them. If the minister goes into politics, he is certain to take concern for his church with him, and then the question often stares him in the face between service of the Church or the State, the two not infrequently seeming to present conflicting claims upon him.—Christian Union.