p. 7 | L. A. S by L. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 13, 1902

L. A. S

By L. A. S.

The following extract from the latest of the pope’s encyclicals, issued since the beginning of the present year, defines clearly the papal position regarding republican government. Under the subheading , “False Idea of Authority,” the encyclical says:—

Along with the family, the political and social order is also endangered by doctrines which ascribe a false origin to authority, and which have corrupted the genuine conception of government. For if sovereign authority is derived formally from the consent of the people, and not from God, who is the supreme and eternal principle of all power, it loses in the eyes of the governed its most august characteristic, and degenerates into an artificial sovereignty which rests on unstable and shifting bases; namely, the will of those from whom it is said to be derived. Do we not see the consequences of this error in the carrying out of our laws? Too often these laws, instead of being sound reason formulated in writing, are but the expression of the power of the greater number, and the will of the predominant political party.

This is precisely the conception of government held and advocated by the societies which are calling for a religious amendment to the Constitution, for the purpose of making the nation Christian. They want the nation’s fundamental law to recognize God as the source of all authority in civil government, doing away entirely with the doctrine that such governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The identity of such a system with the papal conception of government, which no one who will compare the two can fail to perceive, should be a warning to all Protestants to hold aloof from the plans of these misguided reformers.

It is true that God is the source of all proper authority everywhere, since he is the sovereign over all things, and the source of all power. But it is not true that God has commissioned any mortal man to step in between his fellow men and their God, and dictate to them the divine will either in things civil or religious. Here is where the papal system of government, and every other system which sets aside the consent of the governed, is against God. God’s system of government puts nothing whatever between the Creator and the being he has created. The gospel means God with us, God in us. God’s purpose is that man shall be a sovereign, not to rule over others, but to rule over himself. In God’s government the test of greatness and of fitness for high station, is not the ability to rule over others, but the ability to serve.

True republican government recognizes this fixed principle in the relationship of God and man. It does not interfere with that personal and intellectual freedom of man whereby he exercises the power of choice between right and wrong, and develops a character which will determine his destiny. It does not interfere with the working of those spiritual agencies through which God is seeking the salvation of all men, by all the power he himself has at his command.