p. 24 | Baptist Principles of Religious Liberty

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 20, 1910

Baptist Principles of Religious Liberty

In the Baptist missionary organ, Missions, for January, is the following vigorous restatement of the Baptist position on religious liberty:—

The Baptists still stand for the spiritual as against the formal in religion, for immediate agency between God and man, for obedience to the Scriptures, and for the great principles of soul liberty and absolute separation of state and church,—principles acknowledged to-day by all Protestant bodies, but not acknowledged by a powerful ecclesiastical system which is political as well as religious and is persistently putting forth every effort to gain ascendancy without publicity in legislative halls and boards of appropriation. The struggle for soul liberty on these shores is not yet so definitely settled that we do not need an alert, united, and aggressive American Protestantism to ward off attack and win ultimate triumph for that freedom wherewith Christ makes free. In this contest all Baptists are as one.

Through the centuries Baptists have stood for these principles, and suffered for them. As Missions well says, the time is still demanding a vigorous stand for the Word of God as the Christian standard, with resistance of efforts to use civil machinery, as of old, to advance the cause of religion.