National Reform and Soul Liberty

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 26, 1910

National Reform and Soul Liberty

THAT the National Reform Association is still actively opposed to the fundamental principles of this government is clearly declared in the current issue of the Christian Statesman by the editor of that journal. He says:—

While Christian sentiment permeates in great degree our national life, and many Christian features exist in our government, the feeling is also more or

less widely spread that religion must be divorced from politics, and that a man's practical attitude toward the Christian faith ought not to be taken into account when he is being considered for public office. In our proper objection to a union of church and state we have gone too far toward the other extreme of secularism, or godlessness, in political life. Our secular Constitution is the great teacher and bulwark of such belief.

Why should not the feeling be “widely spread” that a man's attitude toward religious matters is strictly an affair of his own, and that his qualification for public office should not depend upon his religious affiliations when the fundamental law of the land explicitly declares such to be the case, and the constitutions of the States make similar declarations? It would be a peculiar situation if such a sentiment did not exist. Says the Constitution of the United States, “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”—Art. VI, last clause. This is one of the fundamental rights of the people, and is legitimately incorporated among the fundamental principles of our government into the fundamental law of the land. It belongs there, and no “Christian patriot” or true patriot of any other class can consistently set himself against the principle or the document in which it is found. But the National Reform Association, though claiming to be composed of “Christian patriots,” has done both. It desires a religious test as a qualification for office, as plainly stated in the foregoing quotation, and it desires an amendment to the Constitution which will make it possible to establish such a test. With the Constitution amended as they wish it, the organization hopes to see the legislation of the country placed upon a basis very different from that on which it rests to-day. So intimated the Rev. J. S. Martin, general superintendent of the organization, at the hearing before the sub-judiciary committee at Washington on April 11. They design that the remodeled Constitution shall be the key to the interpretation of the country's laws; and the organization's attitude toward the last clause of Article VI of the Constitution above quoted should be warning enough of the medieval and early colonial conditions to which they wish the nation to return.