One hundred and twenty-six years ago, July 4, the American Ship of State was launched upon a greatly troubled, mighty sea. Nailed to her mast was the splendid and glorious motto, hitherto unknown among the dominating governments of earth, It meant the recognition of the great truth that men were superior to things; that mind was more than matter; that souls were more than silver and gold. The same principle was thus formulated in that glorious charter of freedom, the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This did not imply that men were equal mentally or physically, as some have sophistically argued. But it did mean that as to the matter of the exercise of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness all stood equal before the law, even as he who had more to do with the framing of the Declaration than any other—Thomas Jefferson—later formulated the same principle:— Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political, . . . freedom of religion, freedom of the press. Shakespeare had long before expressed the same great thought:— The King is but a Man, as I am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a Man; and tho his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. In the great utterances quoted above, all men were included. It was not the white man alone, but the yellow and brown and copper and black. This is indicated by a clause written by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, but afterward expunged before it was signed. While Virginia was yet a colony, Jefferson, Henry, Lee, and other leading men, protested to the king against slavery, which they called “a very pernicious commerce.” But the king compelled the continuation of the traffic. This struggle between the king and the colony took place in the six years preceding the birth of the Declaration of Independence; and the king’s position caused Jefferson to place in his first draft of the Declaration these words: “He [the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.” We need not multiply, as we easily could, similar expressions from Washington, Madison, Henry, founders of our government, and Richard M. Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, U. S. Grant, and many others, its supporters and saviours. It may be needful that we shall point out the important fact that all these principles of equality and freedom are essentially Christian. It was Jesus Christ who said, “One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.” It was the great apostle to the Gentiles who declared: “God that made the world . . . hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” It was the same apostle who said, “Not that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy; for by faith ye stand;” and because this was so, there could be no compulsion in religious matters, and the mission of the Christian is not to enforce, but to win. “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; . . . as tho God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.” And Christ again declares: “If any man hear My words, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” Nor did this imply that the condemnation was left to some tribunal of church and government in subsequent times; for He continues: “He that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.” The above is sufficient to show that the great principles upon which this government was founded were Christian principles, the only part of Christianity which could be appropriated and used by a civil government, and which, held by a government of diverse peoples, of diverse beliefs and no beliefs, would forever prevent the government of such from professing any religion whatsoever, of supporting or promoting any religion or religious body, or of enforcing any religious dogma or institution. Dealing only with men, seeing only that equal justice and right were rendered to each and all, the government could know no class distinctions of race or religion. Under her glorious banner of freedom, the nation prospered. From the best and most liberty-loving of Europe, men flocked in thousands to her shores. It is true that the institution of slavery gave the lie to her great Charter; but slavery was largely a matter of State law not of Federal, and State rights were jealously guarded. But even thus it could not remain, and in 1862 the Emancipation Act vindicated the Declaration of Independence; and so far as law could go, the people of the United States stood before the law free and equal. It was because of these principles that America became the power she is. The sublime truths and principles of freedom swept back across the Atlantic and modified mightily the imperialism of Europe. And if this nation had gone on in the path of progress till every law, general and local, in word and enforcement reflected her glorious charter of liberty, her influence would have changed the world. Two Evil Principles.—But the struggle of the civil war was scarcely over, when two evil principles began to manifest themselves. They had been in existence before, operating more or less in silence, overshadowed by great political issues; but when the war was over, they became growingly and conspicuously manifest. Both of these evil principles were the very opposite of the essential basic principles of the republic. The one may be summed up in Commercialism, with all its evil train of bond-issues, heavy taxation, credit-business, high tariff, monopolies, trusts, and antagonizing organizations of labor and capital, the exploiting of great schemes, the forming of classes and growth of class legislation, and the ever-growing divisions of men and the contempt and hatred between class and class. Out of it has grown the denial of equal rights to peoples who have struggled for freedom for two centuries against a tyrannical power; out of it has grown a cruel war to subjugate those very peoples, because they claimed the rights that made the United States a nation. This same evil has brought the government into more and more intimate relation to the superlatively subtle and diplomatic power on the Tiber, the great enchantress of the nations, the Circe of modern times. And America at the present outlook knows not the potent remedy which will save her from the fate which has befallen those who have gone before. With the conscience-deadening, soul-corrupting, class-dividing, gold-worshiping influence of commercialism has come an evil equally corrupting and disintegrating, namely, decadence in true religion and the growth of religious-legislation sentiment. A church departing from the true standard of religion or following inherited tradition when it is seen to be unsupported by Scripture, invariably seeks the civil power to support its human creed, to uphold its traditional institutions, to enforce its unscriptural dogmas. Among these institutions seeking civil support is the traditional Sunday-sabbath, which confessedly has no support in Scripture. When first agitated by a few National Reformers, it was met with indifference on the part of many persons, by ridicule on the part of others, and by cool, clear logic on the part of papers like the Independent, and strong vigorous protest on the part of Baptists and secular papers generally. But the corrupting influence of the leaven has grown apace. One by one those who protested from principle have yielded principle to policy; and Sunday-laws will be enforced with all the rigor of past ages when the government advances far enough in imperial operation and in the deception of religious decadence to make Sunday laws generally effective. The Federal Government is already committed to the principle of religious legislation. Again and again since 1892 the government has yielded to the religio-political clamors in its several co-ordinate branches. It heeds not nor hears protests now concerning its downward course in this respect. False to the principles that gave it its life, it must in its deliberate departure therefrom inevitably perish. It is sad to pen these words, but God’s “sure word of prophecy” and the logic of recent events demonstrate their truth beyond successful gainsaying. Would God it were different. We have put the departure from right principles altogether too mildly. Public men and teachers now deride the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in respect to the very truths which gave this nation power and influence among her sisters of earth. The departure once apologized for is now defended and advocated with but little protest of principle. The great Seal, with its motto “Novo ordo seclorum,” “a new order of things,” is consigned to forgetfulness, and the nation is turned back, like certain prototypes of old, with faces away from God and toward the idolatry of the human. Let us still raise a warning note in this time of general jubilation over form instead of fact, over the past instead of the present. It is a good time for Americans and Christians to think in this Fourth-of-July season of what the things of the present mean. Are current events and the principles now operative in Church and State making for liberty, for the rights of man, for salvation? Are they exalting men or things?