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Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · February 8, 1894

Proclaim Liberty Anew.

For twenty-five years the Christian Statesman labored arduously, hand-in-glove with the papacy, for “amendments to the Constitution,” and religious legislation to designate us as a “Christian nation,” as if religion could be legislated into human character, and consisted in empty words instead of earnest deeds.

Religion, like love or like death is a power uncontrolled by human laws.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”—Which is pure religion.

“For they, being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness

of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.” Rom. 8: 35-39; 10: 3, 4.

Religion is the power of God unto salvation, the supreme spirit of love, and is superior to all written instruments; and so let it remain. Christ's gospel was a proclamation of absolute liberty. Come every one that will. Choose ye. But the perfect freedom to accept exists alone upon the same freedom to reject. Therefore the wisdom of the framers of our great Constitution should be commended, declaring that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” showing conclusively that no State could give or force its citizens to receive its prescribed religion under penalty of imprisonment, with even the shadow of justice or of liberty of conscience.

Why do the heathen Romans rage and their people imagine a vain thing?—That Americans will become papal slaves, without liberty of conscience, or freedom of worship. Proclaim anew the law of liberty throughout the land!—Welcome Tidings.