Your ShelfYour Projects

Untitled article

20%

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · January 7, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 1

Read the full edition

The Way of the Church with the State.

The editor of the Twentieth Century has found a fifth thing too wonderful for him, that is, the way of a clergyman with the relation of the Church to the State. This is what he says:—
“One can not help wondering at the way some clergymen look at things. For example: In his Thanksgiving sermon as published in full, in the Mail and Express of Nov. 28, the Rev. Ezra Tinker, pastor of Peter Street Methodist Episcopal Church, N. Y., says:—
Another feature of our Government system is the subordination of the Church to the State and the hearty recognition of the latter.The recognized union between the Church and the State, in many European countries, is the source of continual discord, discontent, and great weakness. When the Church presumes to dictate in secular and governmental matters, as in some eastern countries, she transcends her God given functions. Also when she assumes the garb of a mendicant, to be patronized and fed by the bounties of the State, she degrades herself to the level of purely secular institutions. Thank God for a free Church in a free State. While the spirit of the Christian dispensation seems to be opposed to the union of Church and State, as especially detrimental to the interests of the former, facts go to prove that as a matter of worldly policy it is unwise. Go where you will and wherever you find a church in league with the State there you will find coldness, formality, and spiritual dearth.”
“Is it possible that Mr. Tinker does not know that the Church in this country ‘presumes to dictate in secular and governmental matters’ as much as it can, or that ‘she assumes the garb of a mendicant, to be patronized and fed by the bounties of the State’ to the extent of millions of dollars in the form of exemption from taxation? It is not possible. The very church of which he is pastor is the willing recipient of State bounty to the extent perhaps of one or two thousand dollars a year and he must know it. How, then, shall we interpret the foregoing remarks? Is Mr. Tinker a fraud? Or does he take the rest of us for simpletons? The true strength of the Church can not be known until it ceases to be legally favored by the State.”