Not Wanted

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 3, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 36.

Not Wanted.—A dispatch, dated Indianapolis, August 9, printed in the Chicago Record-Herald of August 10, has the following: “George L. McNutt, former pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of this city, who resigned three years ago and went into the factories and on the farms as a common laborer, has been creating a sensation by a series of lectures at Winona Park, the Presbyterian resort. He charges openly that the laboring classes are not welcome in the fashionable churches, and relates an incident in which he entered a church in an eastern city dressed plainly, but genteelly. When he sought a seat he was led to the door, he says, and informed that ‘the mission church around the corner’ was the place for men in his walk of life.” He wonders that more men do not “denounce the church organizations.” It is said that it is even partly so. Surely if there is a place in the world where the laborer should find comfort it is in a church of Jesus the Carpenter.

It does not make any difference as to what religion a government may adopt or legalize; the result is the same in principle if not in degree. The union of Church and State, the support, the promotion, the teaching, or the legalizing of any religion or church is always bad, always degrades religion, always develops persecution of honest dissenters, always means the ruin of the State.