WANTED! A CHRISTIAN PARTY
By T.
Such is the caption of a neatly-printed little leaflet that has just reached us from a gentleman in Iowa. His leaflet is “A Call to the Christian Voters, and to the Press of Our Country” to join in forming a “United Christian Party.” He thinks that such a party is “the need of our day and age” and “the only political remedy.” We have a high regard for those who are seeking in every way they can to bring about reforms. And when the crime and political corruption of every degree and grade that are so rapidly filling the land are taken into account, it is not surprising that men should be seeking means by which the engulfing tide of evil may be stayed. But in seeking for a remedy there is danger of putting instrumentalities into the hands of knavish demagogs that will enable them to do still worse things than they are doing now. Christ, our Master, stands at the head of His church, and He recognizes His church as the great agency through which He carries on His work in the earth. And we have no intimation in the Word He has left to guide us that He would ever use His church as a political party, or a mere adjunct to a political party. But, on the contrary, “Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now is My kingdom not from hence.” John 18:36. It would be impossible to construct language so as to express anything more clearly. And since the Lord utterly refuses to preside as king over this wicked world, what is the use of Christians trying to make Him do what His infinite wisdom declares to be wrong? A man must be a novice, indeed, in history who does not know that untold millions have been most cruelly tortured and killed in the sacred name of Christianity. It was persons seeking to direct the state through a “Christian party” who built the dungeons, and invented the inhumane instruments of torture that mangled and bruised the bodies of men, women, and even tender children during the bloody reign of the persecutions of the past. And the conscience should not be quieted by the oft-repeated statement that “O, it was the Catholics who did that!” For he has only read one side of history who does not know that degenerated Protestantism has burned men at the stake and as inhumanly tortured them as did ever a Catholic—and that, too, all in the name of Christianity. Humanity is the same now as ever. And a “Christian party” in name, for it could be only in name, would furnish a worse channel than any of the old political parties through which the corruption of politics would rush along. A failure to recognize the great fact taught by Jesus that “My kingdom is not of this world,” has been at the bottom of all the blood shed by the martyrs of the past, and to fail to recognize the authority of these same words now, will provide the same horrible results as in days gone by.