A Christian Citizenship Evangelist.
By B.
“The National Christian Citizenship League, moved by profound spiritual passion for the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth, and after prayerful consideration,” says its organ, The Social Forum, “has concluded to add to its other lines, a department of evangelistic work. However much we may realize the inadequacy and deplore the partial failure of present religious effort, we nevertheless know that in the past there has been a deep spiritual fire associated with the old life. Smoldering and dormant it may now be, but as in other times, in response to the soul’s intensest yearnings and man’s supremest need, the breath of God will again fan it into a purifying flame that will sweep over the land, and pride and vanity and the idols of the heart will be dissolved before it like chaff in a furnace. * “We believe that the essential weakness of present-day methods, both in religion and reform, is the failure to address the heart as well as the head. We believe the heart when powerfully appealed to and profoundly stirred will apprehend the right with more unerring accuracy than will the head; that with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and when the emotions are deeply agitated they will overflow, suffuse and compel the assent of the intellect, when confession will be made unto salvation. Believing this, the National Christian Citizenship League propose earnestly to seek a revival of spiritual fervor and power, assured that only through such a revival can Christ’s righteousness be realized, the Christ-life be incarnated in our own and the evils that menace our collective life be abolished.” By “our collective life” the Social Forum means our political life. And this new movement proposes to unite religion and politics, and to appeal to the religious sentiments and feelings of the people to move them to political action. This can mean nothing less than practical union of church and state, first of all in the individual and then in “our collective life.” We are not of those who believe that one can be an honest man in private life and a rogue in public life;485or a saint in the church and a sinner in politics. If one’s religion is worth having it will make him honest wherever he is. But this is quite a different thing from saying that “when the emotions are deeply agitated they will overflow, suffuse and compel the assent of the intellect.” We want no government by camp-meeting or revival methods. Government by “the emotions” “deeply agitated” by fervid appeals to religious sentiment is just what they had in Spain and the Netherlands under the sway of the Inquisition. Another form of it is seen to-day in the Boxer uprising in China; while our American Sunday laws are due to the same cause—deep religious feeling rather than sanctified common sense. The Christian Citizenship League is pursuing either a phantom, or the deamon of church-and-state union. If the first, their efforts must be fruitless of practical results; if the second, their success could bring only wide-spread ruin; first of American liberty and American manhood, and secondly of the Republic itself.