State and Church by H.

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 30, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 25.

State and Church

By H.

STATESMEN and warriors have their peculiar characteristics. Gladstone and Marshall, Jefferson and Lincoln, Alexander and Cæsar, Washington and Grant,—all these and others by the thousand are examples. They were skilful in dealing with men and conditions. Ready to use the popular trend of feeling and influence the public mind, they succeeded in their spheres. With all of them their life-work was largely the result of their life-training. Schooled in statecraft or warfare, they were prepared to stand at the head of men, in governmental bodies or on the battlefield. The world is ready to honor these men for the work they did. The governments they served, protected, or established, are monuments of their skill.

Thoughtful people of every age have admired another class of men, a class who have given their lives to the service of God by service to their fellows. Paul and his companions in the early days of the Gospel, Luther and his coworkers in the Reformation, Williams in the stormy days of our colonial history, Carey and an army of others who were lights in mission fields, not to name even a few of the scores of men and women of later days who have and do mold the religious life of their times,—these are worthy of a share in the glories of human endeavor and achievement. And the world is ready to honor these, too.

But do we class them together? Practically never. Great statesmen are not associated in the mind with great pulpit orators, philanthropists, missionaries, or evangelists. Great as the latter may be, or however pious the former, each is in a class by himself. If the warrior prayed before his battles, the historian makes special mention of it; if the minister of the Gospel is much interested in political matters, people unconsciously question his piety.

Why should this be? Simply because the sphere of the state is, or the human heart somehow feels that it should be, far removed from the realm of religion. A statesman may be religious, and is all the better for it, but when he favors his religion or his religious constituents in public laws or judgment, he serves only a part of his constituency, and brings together two forces which are incompatible. A Gospel worker may be public-spirited and loyal to civil authority, but his source of strength is not the hand of man, not the power of the state, but the God of heaven. When he stoops to ask the help of the state in the furtherance of his religious plans and beliefs, he tacitly acknowledges that he has lost faith in the power of God.

Granted that the thing he seeks to advance is right and true, still the state has no prerogative in the matter, for religion in every phase is a matter between God and man, a matter of which God is the author and director; man’s part is to obey. And while it is his duty to obey, man has not the slightest right to compel obedience, even God Himself does not do that. God’s law is a law of liberty, fair and kind and broad,—broader than man’s life and needs, else it could not save him,—and when man attempts to legislate upon it, he makes it narrow, so narrow—and human. He brings it down to his own level, and by this very act he removes his own source of salvation.

What wisdom we see, then, in the words of U. S. Grant: “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contribution. Keep the state and the church forever separate.” And that other statement by James Madison: “There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion. The least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.”