Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · March 17, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 11

A CORRESPONDENT of the Examiner, writing from Jackson, Mississippi, says:

Our State Legislature is now in session at the capital, and is said to be an unusually fine body of men, many of them Christians and in favor of reform measures. The Baptists have a liberal representation in the body.

How a denomination comes to have representatives in a State Legislature is not easy to see. Even in Mississippi the members of the Legislature are supposed to be chosen to represent the citizens of the districts in which they severally reside. Possibly some prove recreant to their trust and represent not the people but certain religious organizations among the people. Baptists most of all should blush to confess that this is true of members of that communion. But if “many” of the members of the Legislature of Mississippi are in favor of reform, they should at once sweep from the statute book of that State the religious laws which at present disfigure it. Christian men and reformers ought to be just. However, if the statement is correct that they represent not their districts, but their churches, nothing in the line of real reform can be expected of them.