Religion in the Constitution

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 14, 1871

Religion in the Constitution.

The Examiner and Chronicle, the most influential, as well as the most widely circulated, of the Baptist journals of this country, under the title, “Short Method of Conversion,” thus alludes to the movement for a religious amendment of the Constitution:—

“We have wondered at the magical effects ascribed to the Sacraments according to High Church theology. But turning a nation from atheists to Christians by a few strokes of the pen, by a vote in Congress, and ratifying votes in three-fourths of the State Legislatures, is equally miraculous and incomprehensible.

“This agitation for a national religion, officially professed, has for its logical outcome persecution—that, and nothing more nor less. It is a movement backward to the era of Constantine, as far below the spirituality of the New Testament as it is below the freedom of Republican America.”