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At the National Reform Convention

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 21, 1911

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 88, No. 38.

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At the National Reform Convention

By C. M. S.

A Dangerous and Untrue Hypothesis and How It Works Out

It is difficult to conceive of a movement more solidly and persistently set against the American principles of government than is that being conducted by the National Reform Association.
It no longer issues a denial when charged with the attempt to establish a theocracy in America.
It openly avows its determination to rewrite the Constitution of the United States, and by so doing to give an entirely different basis for all the laws of the nation.
It ignores those just principles of government, that it is the minority that needs protection, rather than the majority; and that, therefore, such a check as a national constitution is essential that the strong may not tyrannize over the weak.
It creates an arbitrary definition of church-and-state union, and denounces such a union, the while it works to bring about the same condition under a different name.
It makes the state a religious being, a moral entity with a soul to be saved, a person held directly accountable to God, needing to offer worship to God as an individual does, having a conscience which it must maintain even if to do so it must crush the deepest convictions of any or all of its subjects.
Under its proposed régime, the rights of no individual would be secure; for the state is everything, and the individual has no rights which the state is bound to respect. Under that program, the state has but to declare that its religious rights are infringed by the religious practises of its citizens, and their rights at once cease to exist. The state has only to declare that its conscientious convictions are out of harmony with the conscientious convictions of any number of its subjects, and at once the conscientious convictions of its best-meaning subjects are a misdemeanor or a felony.
All that and much more of a similar character is mapped out on the program of the National Reform Association. It is all the outgrowth of that pestilential theory that the state is established by God for the upbuilding of Christ’s kingdom in the earth. On that postulate hangs the whole bloody mantle of persecution. That theory makes the work or calling of the magistrate as sacred or holy as that of the evangelist. That public official becomes the arbiter of every man’s religious rights, the censor of every man’s conscience, the court of last resort in the decision of every religious controversy.
On such a postulate hangs the whole Russian system of oppression and persecution toward its own subjects and of intolerance toward the religious exercises of visiting foreigners. Pagan Babylon, Persia, and Rome acted upon it when they trampled upon every right of the people of God. Papal Rome acted upon the same principle. She was the state as well as the church. She had conscientious convictions; and as the state has rights which it is bound to maintain, as against the so-called rights of any or all her subjects, she ground into the earth all who had conscientious convictions and dared to let the fact be known.
Just as soon as the rulers of the state become possessed of the idea that the state is established for the upbuilding of the kingdom of God on earth, they begin to use the only power the state possesses — force — to carry on that work. But force is the bitterest foe of the gospel. Force and the gospel are diametrically opposed to each other. They are not servants of the same master. One wins through love and conviction to willing acceptance; the other drives, compels, to an unwilling obedience. One entreats with loving pity and compassion; the other threatens with forbidding face. One binds with cords as strong as those which hold the spheres in place, but as invisible and as soft as the winds that kiss the apple blossoms in the spring; the other binds with chains that can never hold the soul, but can only mar and bruise the body and clank in hateful monotone at every step of the suffering captive. No, they are not products of the same workshop; they are not servants of the same power; they are not employed in the interests of the same kingdom; they do not produce results that can be gathered into the same storehouse. God established and commissioned his church to carry on the work of his kingdom on the earth; he never commissioned any other organization to do that work; and when the state undertakes it, she not only does so without warrant, but she tramples upon the most vital interests of the kingdom she professes to serve. There is no lesson of history plainer than this, none more vital, and none which is more sadly neglected by the great religious organizations of the world. God has himself condemned it in these words: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.”
The National Reform idea puts the government where Roman Catholics put the Pope. Said Dr. J. S. Martin: “The civil ministers stand between God and the people. They represent the people before God, and they represent God before the people.” Under that conception, the state is put in the place of God, and such a state would thus become a part of that great “mystery of iniquity” against which the inspired apostle warns the church of God.
During the course of his address on August 13, Dr. Martin gave several illustrations to prove that this is not really a Christian nation; and yet he frequently quoted, approvingly, expressions from State courts and the United States Supreme Court declaring this to be a Christian nation.
On August 15, in an address on “The Source of the State’s Authority,” Dr. Martin took the position that the state has absolutely unlimited authority in the earth, deriving that unlimited authority directly from God, though the exercise of this unlimited authority is manifested through the people. That is but a modern echo of that old pagan slogan, “Vox populi, vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God). When, therefore, the majority of the people pass a law affecting the religious rights or duties of the individual citizen, that is God speaking, and the individual must obey, must bring his conscience into line with the voice of the majority of the people; and if he fails to do this, the state is there with sword and shackles to force obedience or punish obstinacy. And after twenty centuries of gospel light, such theories as this can still be soberly advocated, even in America, and by men ordained to the gospel ministry!
In the same address, the speaker declared that the state has unlimited authority to “determine what in human conduct is enforceable by law;” that “what the state shall enforce by law is not a matter of political expediency, but of moral responsibility, and this decision the state is under obligation to make under the law of its divine character and ruler.” That would put the individual completely under the control of the state in religion as well as in civil affairs. It would make the state the god of the individual, and rule God himself entirely out of his universe. The code of the state laws would then become the bible of the people; and as the people themselves make the laws, they would make their own bible. As the laws they make would express the divine will, they would justly look upon themselves as the mouthpieces of the Almighty. Into such absurdities and inconsistencies and wicked assumptions are men led, once they adopt the pernicious idea that the state is established to advance the kingdom of Christ in the earth.
One of the laments of the institute was this: “We have no clearly defined system of morals.” One could not but inquire what the Bible is in the world for, and what basis ministers have for their moral teaching.
Concerning the demands for a Sunday law, the speaker made this peculiar statement: “The civil sabbath law — its object is twofold. It is to secure to the man who wants to worship on that day the right to worship, likewise to secure to each individual his right to rest one day in seven.” That statement is peculiar in that while the law is called a “civil sabbath law,” yet it is admittedly enacted for a religious purpose — the purpose of worship. But it would not do for the advocates of a Sunday law to admit that they were asking for the passage of a religious Sabbath law. Such manipulation of words to hide a real purpose ought to convince every true Christian that the cause which makes it necessary is an unworthy one.
Twenty centuries before the advent of the National Reform Association, pagan Rome was teaching that the individual existed for the state; that the state was bound to maintain its own rights “as against the so-called rights of any individual or class of individuals.” And she excluded nothing in either religious or temporal affairs from the all-absorbing application of that pronouncement. Papal Rome followed in all the century-old grooves of that principle and practise. No matter what sphere the state invaded, it at once drew into its insatiable maw all individual rights, and made the practise of those rights by individuals a matter of the state’s sufferance, to be granted or forbidden as the state might elect.
Against that doctrine the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Constitution of the United States in its present form are a perpetual protest. George Bancroft, the historian, is right when he associates the two in this declaration:—
Vindicating the right of individuality even in religion, and in religion above all, the new nation dared to set the example of accepting in its relations to God the principle first divinely ordained in Judea. It left the management of temporal things to the temporal power; but the American Constitution, in harmony with the people of the several States, withheld from the federal government the power to invade the home of reason, the citadel of conscience, the sanctuary of the soul; and not from indifference, but that the infinite spirit of eternal truth might move in its freedom and purity and power.—“History of the Formation of the Constitution,” book 5, chap. 1.
Although more than once the declaration was made at this institute that “we do not believe in a union of church and state,” yet through all the teaching given ran the principles of that union of civil and religious things. Said Dr. Wilson: “We center the idea of citizenship in Jesus Christ. This person of Jesus Christ is religion; this person of Jesus Christ is the state.” If this theory does not unite church and state, it has never been united in the history of the world.
It is, of course, called a union of religion and the state; but the union of religion and the state was what pagan Rome thought she was getting when she outlawed Christ and all his followers if they should teach the worship of any new gods. Religion and the state were the two things papal Rome thought she was uniting when she made the state the obedient tool of organized religion, and outlawed all who practised any religion other than hers. Germany thought she was uniting religion and the state when she took the best religion she knew, Lutheranism, and made it the spouse of the state, while she practically confiscated the religious rights of all who were not religious in that particular way. Religion and the state were what England thought she was uniting when she created a religious system of her own and confiscated the religious rights of Roman Catholics, Congregationalists, Baptists, and others. She called the organized manifestation of her religion a church; but it is not what a thing is called, so much as what it really is and what it does, that counts. The early colonists surely thought they had a union of religion and the state, and would have hanged those who asserted the contrary. Russia is admittedly a country of church-and-state union; and but very few would dare risk their freedom in Russia by asserting that Russia does not have a union of religion and the state. The proposition would be contradicted by every member of the Orthodox Church, from the czar to the poorest peasant. To teach that a union of religion and state is not a union of church and state is to spin a thread of logic too fine for anything but the fabrics of dreamland to hang upon.
Dr. Martin declared: “The state is not infallible; it might make mistakes.” Dr. Wilson declared: “This person of Jesus Christ is the state.” Then we have a Saviour who is fallible, who may make mistakes, and who, because of his mistakes, proves himself no savior at all. It is impossible to conceive how the kingdom of Christ can be advanced by such logic.
Dr. Martin had declared that the Constitution of the United States was drawn up under the intoxicating influence of the infidel philosopher, Rousseau. Dr. Wilson declared it “must have been given to us from some inspired oracle,” and that “the religion of Jesus Christ actuated the founders of the nation. They were all more or less influenced by this great truth as we find it in the Christian religion.” Yet the same speaker declared that through French influence a great blunder was made, and “the name of God and of Jesus Christ as the ruler of nations was left out.” Thus we find that “the religion of Jesus Christ,” actually present and actuating “the founders of the nation,” was less potent than the influence of a French philosopher three thousand miles away, and that, too, before the days of telepathy, wireless telegraphy, or “malicious animal magnetism.” We find that an absent French philosopher is more potent and effective than an inspired oracle. Into what quagmires of inconsistency will a false hypothesis lead thinking, reasoning human beings, once they have committed themselves to it! This particular hypothesis, untrue and dangerous, is that the state is established and designed for the work of building up the kingdom of God in the earth. But it is a fundamental principle of the National Reform propaganda. C. M. S.