p. 14 | A Religious Institution by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 18, 1911

A Religious Institution

By C. M. S.

For a long time we have contended that it is the purpose of the National Reform Association to unite church and state in this country. They have disclaimed the contention, as so worded, although the entire program of the organization looks in that direction. A recent statement of one of the oldest leaders in that movement lays the purpose bare in no uncertain language. Rev. J. M. Foster, for many years field secretary of the organization, after setting forth certain unwholesome conditions existing in this country, such as the multiplicity of divorces, murders, suicides, railroad accidents, cormorant trusts, and soulless corporations, laid the blame for all this upon the secular Constitution of the nation, thus:— A secular Constitution makes a secular government. A secular government makes a secular nation. And a secular nation, which is a godless nation, is the object of God's wrath. The secular Constitution will ruin the United States. The land can not remain part secular and part religious. It must become all religious, or it will become all secular. Either cast out the fatal germ or lose the nation's life.

The opposite of secular is religious, and the wording of the excerpt shows that that is what Mr. Foster means. The purpose of that organization is to put a religious Constitution in the place of the present Constitution, and so make of this government a religious government, and of this nation a religious nation. It follows, then, that all the laws enacted by such a government would be religious laws. All its legislation would be religious legislation. When it is pointed out that the legislation which the organization is seeking now (such as laws for the observance of Sunday and for the amendment of the Constitution so that it shall recognize God and the Lord Jesus Christ) is religious legislation, the organization's representatives protest that the legislation they seek is not religious legislation, but civil only; that the regulations which they are asking are police regulations merely. But how will it be possible for a religious government to enact anything but religious laws? or for a religious nation to enforce upon its people anything that is not religious? This proposition to make the nation “all religious,” and to do it by metamorphosing the nation's fundamental law, shows as plainly as words can that the fundamental purpose of that organization is a union of church and state, with the state saddled and bridled, and the church in the saddle. Such an institution would be a religious institution,—in form,—and the form made compulsory; and true religion would be hunting the caves and mountain fastnesses as it did in the days of pagan and papal Rome and of the Scotch Covenanters. C. M. S.