Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 6, 1913

A Two-Edged Truth

THE Christian Statesman for February quotes approvingly the following statement from a recent number of the Presbyterian:—

So long as a nation or a civilization is obedient to the law which God has inwrought in the nature of things, and which he has revealed in its moral principles in the Holy Scripture, so long that nation will live and prosper. But when a nation ignores or disobeys God's laws, it violates the principles of its own life and the justice of God, and so, in time, destruction and decay overtake it, both by the way of natural consequences and by moral judgment.

But when a nation or a society or an individual not only ignores and disobeys God's law, but seeks to substitute a human law for a portion of God's law and to punish men by fine and imprisonment for choosing to obey God's law as it is rather than man's amendment of it, surely that nation or society or individual is doubly deserving of the divine displeasure. But that is the program which the National Reform Association has mapped out for itself, and that is the policy which the Christian Statesman stands for. As for us, we prefer to keep the law of God as he gave it, believing that “we ought to obey God rather than men.”