Untitled article by W. H. M.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · April 21, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 16

Another Congressional Hearing.

By W. H. M.

On Tuesday, April 12, the House Committee on the Judiciary granted a hearing to representatives of the National League for the Preservation of American Institutions upon petitions and a memorial presented, in behalf of the League, in the House, by Mr. Springer of Illinois. The petitions pray “for the passage of a constitutional amendment forbidding the use of public money, or credit, for the purpose of founding, maintaining, or aiding any church, religious denomination, or religious society, or any institution, society, or undertaking which is wholly or in part under sectarian or ecclesiastical control.” The constitutional amendment offered proposes to extend to each State the terms of restriction as to laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and applicable to Congress, coupling with that the specifications of the petition.

Rev. J. M. King, Secretary of the League, first addressed the Committee. Mr. King discussed the standing of the League as comprising within its membership the intellect, wealth, and influence of the country, and said that it had already two hundred local secretaries throughout the United States. Twenty-one States, Mr. King said, have already clauses in their Constitutions forbidding appropriations for sectarian purposes. It was claimed that the purpose of the League, was to eliminate religious questions from politics; and secure the complete separation of Church and State; that it was neither anti-Roman Catholic, anti-Protestant, nor anti-Judaic, but that these all were with them; yet a question from Mr. Oates, of Alabama, drew out that the great danger feared was apparent only in the encroachments of the Roman Catholics in New York and Minnesota.

Wm. Allen Butler, of the law committee of the League, followed Mr. King; he said that what was asked was but a logical expression of the First Amendment to the Constitution applied to the States. The division between Church and State is one of the first and fundamental principles of this American Government. Yet he defended the exemption of ministers, churches, and religious charities from taxation. Mr. Culberson asked if Congress did not make appropriations every year for church charities in the District of Columbia, and for church schools among the Indians. Mr. Butler replied that if they did it was contrary to the First Amendment to the Constitution. Several questions were then asked tending to show that members of the Committee looked upon the amendment, asked for, as being calculated to inaugurate a restrictive constitutional policy instead of leaving each State to be governed only by the general principles of the Constitution and free to establish its own special restrictions.

After the close of the hearing Mr. King was asked that if the intent of the restriction of the First Amendment upon the Congress of the United States was extended to the different States why the principle embodied would not require the repeal of all laws bearing on religion, such as the requirement of the belief in a God as a qualification to testify as a witness, laws against blasphemy, and laws requiring Sunday observance. He replied that it would not do that because it was specialized entirely upon the matter of the appropriation of money for sectarian purposes.

The purpose of this League is then not the separation of Church and State but the concentration of the forces of a religion into a more complete union with the centralized power of the State and an elimination of disturbing elements.

W. H. M.