RIGHTEOUSNESS AN INDIVIDUAL MATTER.
We hear very much now-a-days about national righteousness and civic righteousness, a general, corporate thing which is absolutely necessary to the salvation of the nation and race. We are told by Mr. Charles M. Sheldon, for instance:— The Bible teaching . . . expressly declares that governments that do not heed the voice of God, States that break moral laws, peoples that disobey divine laws, will suffer, and finally be destroyed, just as an individual will suffer and finally lose his life if he persists in disobeying the fundamental law of righteousness. . . . There is not one law for an individual and another law for a nation or community. If it is wrong for an individual to sell intoxicating drinks, it is wrong for a nation to go into the liquor business for the sake of revenue. If it is wrong for an individual to make money by running a saloon, it is also wrong for a city to license such an institution for money. If it is not righteous for an individual to make money at the expense of a weaker brother, it is also unrighteous for a government to do the same thing through its commercial relations with other governments.—Christian Herald, Apr. 9, 1902. Now all this is true, emphatically true. But in what follows is where the mistake lies:— A government, in order to have that righteousness that exalts and keeps alive, must be taught in every possible way the authority of a divine Being. The Republic . . . seems to forget the fear of God, and reverence for divine authority. The idea obtains with many even more strongly than with Mr. Sheldon that the Republic, the government, the state, can be taught. But any or all of these can be taught only through the individual. If individuals sufficient had right conceptions of truth, purity, duty, there would be no legal unrighteousness in the liquor traffic, no oppression of smaller nations. The conscience that is wrong is the individual conscience. No truly Christian man will do through a corporation, if it is in his power to remedy it, what he will not do as an individual. If he thinks that God will excuse him because he has companions in crime, his own individual sense of righteousness needs remedying. The nation is made up of an aggregation of individuals. What these individuals are, the nation is. No national legislation ever can change the individual heart or morally affect the nations. All reformation, all lifting to a higher plane, must be through the individual soul. And all efforts to reform a nation socially and morally apart from the individual, will result only in hypocritical profession and greater wickedness.