Forces Uniting for the Final Conflict
By C. M. S.
There is a tremendous issue before the people of the United States. It is being brought before them so insidiously and in such almost perfect disguise that the people do not realize the danger and the importance of the issue. That issue is nothing less than the proposition so to transform the fundamental law of the nation as to establish the government upon a basis entirely different from that which it now rests upon, and which its founders designed it should always rest upon. Two things are prominent in the present fundamental law of the nation; viz., the rights of the individual and the separation of religion from the functions of government. In those two characteristics our government stands in a unique position among the nations of earth. Its history has been a remarkable one. Its prosperity and stability have been the wonderment of the world. And it is due to the establishment and the maintenance of those principles of liberty and equity that it has been thus prosperous and thus stable. There can be no equality among men so long as the religious views or customs of one portion of the people are enforced upon another portion of the people. The people whose religious customs, practises, usages, or beliefs are thus given recognition and preference are exalted above those who must sacrifice their religious scruples, and customs, and practises at the behest of others. Just as soon as that principle is admitted as a principle of this government, the great rock upon which the government is builded is shattered and crumbled, and no man’s liberties or rights are safe from invasion and usurpation. More than that, the principles upon which the nation is now builded are the principles of true Protestantism,—the right of private judgment and the right of the private individual to act in harmony with the dictates of his private judgment, unless in so doing he should come into collision with the equal rights of others. That arrangement was and is opposed to the principle which ruled the world7during the dark ages, and which is in vogue even in our day in every country wherein religion and the state are joined. The principle of a union of religion and the state always was the principle upon which pagan governments were established. But when paganism went down, and the Papacy took its place, that principle of government was adopted and baptized into the new order of things. The pontifex maximus of paganism was adopted into the holy order of the new régime; and that title which stood highest in the heathen world became likewise the highest in the papal hierarchy. Under such a rule the conscience of the individual was snuffed out, or his life was snuffed out if he persisted in following out the leadings of his conscience. The individual was nothing, and the state was everything. The individual was a mere chattel of the state. He existed for its use, and had no rights which it was bound to respect. There was no such thing as individual rights or the right of private judgment. Against those principles and propositions the Reformers and the whole Reformation protested. And against those principles the republic of America also entered protest, and does still protest in its Declaration of Independence and its federal Constitution. Now there are numerous organizations in this country whose members seem deaf to their country’s protest or blind to its history, and are laboring with a zeal worthy of a better cause to bring about the very conditions against which the country’s fundamental documents now protest,—the conditions which made possible the martyrdoms and oppressions and hypocrisies of the middle ages. The members of these organizations are not tired of exercising their own right of private judgment; but they are tired of having others exercise theirs; and they seemingly forget that when they place the other man’s right of private judgment in jeopardy, they are, in that same act, jeopardizing their own rights in that particular. There is now organized in the State of Indiana what is known as the Civic Union. This is to be the parent organization for similar organizations in all the States of the Union. The purpose of the organization is to unite all civic societies in all the cities and villages of America for the purpose of enforcing certain “moral laws;” and among the very first of those laws is the Sunday law. This Civic Union will not restrict its membership to members of Protestant civic organizations, but designs to unite Catholic and Protestant bodies on that one issue of enforcing Sunday laws and certain other laws which it designates as “moral laws.” Catholics and professed Protestants have been hinting to each other for years that it would be a good idea to unite their forces on such an issue. Protestants have openly invited Catholics to unite with them on this issue, and Catholics have invited Protestants to a similar union of effort. At the meeting of the American Federation of Catholic Societies held in Columbus, Ohio, September 21-24, Bishop McFaul said:— The day is past when persons fight about creeds. We are willing at any time to unite with our non-Catholic friends to aid in solving any national problem. One of those “national problems” which Bishop Canevin declared the Federation would help in solving was the enforcement of Sunday rest. Now while the Civic Union is advocating the union of Protestant and Catholic bodies for the enforcement of Sunday laws, and the American Federation of Catholic Societies proposes to meet such movements half-way, there is another principle upon which that union agrees with the Catholic Church; and this principle on which they unite is as un-American as any principle ever advocated by the National Reform Association. The president of the Civic Union, in an address at Warsaw, Ind., on August 20, said:— The right of private judgment in religion has been so overworked that we have many denominations. The right of private judgment has been the key-note and the glory of Protestantism. The Catholic hierarchy has always been opposed to it; and this Civic Union proposes a union with Catholicism on that un-Protestant and un-American basis. Says the “Manual of Christian Doctrine” (Catholic):— Has the state the right and the duty to proscribe schism or heresy?—Yes, it has the right and the duty to do so, both for the good of the nation and for that of the faithful themselves; for religious unity is the principal foundation for social unity.—Question 120. So the two organizations are united already upon the principle of opposition to the right of private judgment. One says the right of private judgment has been overworked. The other declares it to be the right and duty of the state to proscribe (suppress) schism or heresy. And all who are not Roman Catholics are schismatics, and therefore ought to be suppressed. There is another organization which has set for itself the task of enforcing Sunday laws, and this organization is, in this country in point of numbers, the greatest of them all. That organization is the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, having a constituency of between seventeen and eighteen millions. It is more than a coincidence that this organization is coming to stand where the others do upon the question of the right of private judgment and the importance of maintaining that right. Rev. William H. Roberts, chairman of the council in 1905 and acting president in 1908, in discussing the question of unity in foreign fields, said:— “We stand, first of all upon the distinctive principle of the Protestant Reformation, the right of private judgment. . . . But the day for insistence upon that right, in the judgment of many of us, has gone by.” He declared that he did not want to see his denomination “so emphasize the right of private judgment as to injure cooperation and federation.”—“Report of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America,” page 37. The right of private judgment in religious matters is a Protestant Reformation principle—a distinctively Christian principle. The principle which is opposed to that is a distinctively papal principle; and it is a significant fact that all three of these organizations which have set themselves for the enforcement of the Sunday institution upon the people are either set against or ready to abandon one of the most distinctive features of Protestantism—the right of private judgment. It is, of course, only logical that they should do this, in view of the fact that the Sunday institution is papal in origin, and its establishment was accomplished by human laws that ignored and trampled upon the right of private judgment. And there is another organization that has long espoused the cause of Sunday enforcement, which is also set against the principle of the right of private judgment. That is the National Reform Association. Said Dr. W. J. Wilson in an address on The Bible in the Public School, at the recent National Reform Convention at Winona Lake, Ind.:— There must be a national conscience maintained; and there is such a thing as a national conscience, a policy which must be above all individual conscience, and the state has a right to maintain it. That sacrifices private judgment at one fell blow; for private judgment can never be guaranteed where the state enters the realm of religion, claims for itself a conscience, and maintains it at the expense of the conscientious convictions of any or all of its citizens. That is what papal Rome did, and the blood of the martyrs still cries from the ground against her and against that principle. But the National Reform Association, which has thus given a quitclaim deed to the state for its conscience and is trying to do the same for the conscience of the entire nation, is also, like the other three organizations mentioned, thoroughly committed to that other papal principle, the enforcement of a religious institution, the Sunday. It is a fact susceptible of exact demonstration that every organization in the world that has set itself for the enforcement8of the Sunday institution has also set itself against the right of private judgment or has abandoned claim to the right to exercise that privilege. It is a logical step to take. The Sunday institution is papal in origin; the enforcement of religious ordinances or customs or usages is a papal principle; the denial of the right of private judgment is papal also; and he who espouses the one espouses the other logically and naturally. This union of these organizations in the manner above pointed out clearly indicates how, not long hence, the whole world will unite under papal supervision and upon the papal principle of the right of the state to force the consciences of the people, and “cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” This is not a theory built upon dreams and human visions. It is the working out of a definite program long foretold in God’s Word, and soon to reach its culmination.