THERE are movements in progress in various parts of the world at the present time whose purpose it is to make men religious by force of civil enactment. Under the pretence of making it hard for men to do wrong and easy for them to do right, laws are passed which deal specifically with man's relation to God.
Pathe Photo
H.R.H. PRINCE OF WALES LANDING AT ST. KILDA,
MELBOURNE, ON MAY 26, 1920
In the days when it was dangerous to be a Christian, the world saw the staunchest Christians in the world. In those days the Church was purer than it has ever been since. But when Christianity became popular, the dry rot of formalism and the gangrene of hypocrisy came in to do their deadly work. With the Reformation new life came into the rapidly deteriorating body; but even the new organisation would not release its grip upon the consciences of men and women. The battle for the freedom of the soul has been a long one; and that emancipation is still delayed, except as individuals declare their independence of the spiritual dominance of other men or organisations.
The movements now in progress in the world look to and are working toward a strengthening of the grip of formal religion upon the consciences and religious activities of mankind.
Various Churches are working toward a closer organic control of their own affairs that with the increased power and increased organisation they may ultimately gain control of the affairs of others. Churches that have been long and distinctively separated are planning union, and even the greater religious divisions of Christendom are looking about to find some basis of union.
THE argument for this union is that “in union there is strength”; that the Church is weak because of her divisions, and thus unable to accomplish what she might otherwise do. So through union with the human she seeks for power over the world, power to make her wishes dominant and to ensure acquiescence in all her demands. She forgets that when the Church was strongest in the things of this world356she was farthest from fulfilling the purpose of her Master, farthest from Him, and weakest in her power to uplift humanity and to exemplify the character of Jesus Christ in her dealings with men. In the Dark Ages the “Church” had the world in the palm of her hand; but she made it a torture chamber for true religion, a dungeon for conscience and a hot-bed for immorality. Out of the bedlam the Reformation rescued the scattered and beaten remnant of the true Church.
TODAY the great formal bodies of Christendom are yearning for power again, and are reaching out the hand in every direction in the hope of grasping some pillar of potentiality that will enable them to climb into the throne of universal power again. When Rome had that power, the world had its midnight of horror and persecution. When the power-coveting Church secures that power again, we may write “Ichabod” over the temple of soul freedom, and expect soon to see the sword of Jehovah cleaving the heavens to usher in the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. The rack and thumbscrew, the wheel and the fiery stake, have taken through the long centuries a fearful toll of conscientious followers of Jesus Christ; and Heaven looked on in sorrow. But when Christendom unites again to make men offenders for conscience' sake, to whip, and to scourge, and to drive unwilling souls under penalty of persecution, Heaven itself will call a halt to the pitiless work, and they who have made a covenant with God by sacrifice (Ps. 50:5) will receive the eternal reward.
IT is of that grand culmination the psalmist speaks in these words:—
Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall devour before Him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about Him. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that He may judge His people. Gather My saints together unto Me; those that have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice. And the heavens shall declare His righteousness: for God is judge Himself. Ps. 50:3-6.
It is of that same time and of the same faithful people that He is speaking (verse 15) when He says: “Call upon Me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.” Of the culmination of that same movement the Revelator speaks these words:—
He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints. And I beheld another beast [or power] coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast [or power] before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. . . . And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. Rev. 13:10-15.
There is faithfully portrayed by the pen of Inspiration the organisation of another great religious system that has grasped the power of human law to force the consciences of men and put every non-conformist under interdict and sentence of death. It is an “image of the beast,” an image in that respect of the organisation which did that very work when a power-coveting religious organisation grasped the reins of the world, and drove it toward the precipice of ruin. The hand of the God-ordained Reformation checked its disastrous career in that day; the hand of Jehovah Himself will stop it in our day. It was never God’s intention that men should be scourged by other men to make them patterns of the divine purpose. The strongest power He uses or permits others to use in His cause is the power of love. When that fails to win men’s hearts, the armoury of heaven is exhausted, and men must be left to reap the results of their own choosing—life or death. Men cannot be made righteous by human law, nor driven into God’s kingdom with the lash of persecution.
