A POPULAR REVOLT by C. M. S.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 3, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 14.

A POPULAR REVOLT.

By C. M. S.

The American republic was founded in the providence of God. It was to be a standing object lesson to both nations and individuals in God’s design concerning the freedom of mankind—a lesson which the common people were not slow to appreciate. Whatever it has come to be at the present time, God’s design in its founding was that it should teach men the blessing of liberty, and teach it by the example which it set within its own borders. The principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, that none are by the mere accident of birth authorized to lord it over their fellow-creatures, is one of the principles of the Gospel of Christ. The equality of men so far as liberty and human rights are concerned was not new in 1776 except to the officials of monarchical governments and to those who had been taught that some were created for the special service and caprice of others deemed better by birth. To such it was a new doctrine, and to some of such the doctrine of arrant heresy; but it is as old as the Gospel itself.

Here, then, was the opportunity of the ages; and here was the chosen instrument to make known the glorious glad tidings to men. Humanity had groaned thru centuries because of involuntary servitude, and in the trackless wilderness of America God planted a tree whose leaves were designed for the healing of the bruised and suffering people of this present world. They have flocked to it from all quarters of the globe, till the nations have been compelled, for the security of their own existence, to grant a measure of liberty which their inhabitants had never before experienced. On the highest hill of the world sat God’s last national object lesson for the last generations of men; and the oppressed of all the world have been struggling up thru the crust of imperialism, monarchism, to reach the sunlight of free government in their own land or flee to a government already founded upon the principles of the equality of man.

The distrust of the Cubans is caused by the fear that America has thrown aside her chart and compass and is drifting with the gale on a backward track. The Filipinos know to their sorrow that the principles which made us a nation have been thrown to the winds, and that instead of being a free people governing themselves, they are to be a subject people governed by another people seven thousand miles away. It is this same love of liberty which is causing the farmers of the two Dutch republics to persist in their pitiful warfare against overwhelming odds. However unreasonable they may have been, or fanatical if they were, or however undemocratic their democracy appeared, there is something pathetic in the almost interminable struggle they are making to be free from the rule of another people—that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from” their part of “the earth.”

One after another, Mexico and the South American States threw off the yoke of foreign domination in temporal affairs and set up for themselves as sovereign States; but, not learning the lesson well, they have failed in the most important feature of their government. They permitted the control of their affairs by a foreign ecclesiastical prince, the self-chosen pretender to the thrones of the whole world. Because of that domination they refused freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, teaching, reading; and in refusing these things, denied themselves the very blessings that home government would have showered upon them. They allowed to slip out of their reach the blessings their hands had almost clasped; and warring factions have sapped and will continue to sap the substance of their people, and the progress of the Gospel there is necessarily slow. In Venezuela and Colombia the people are in open revolt against the clerical party, and in some of the other States a hopeful spirit of toleration is coming in which is bitterly opposed by the officials of the church both at home and in Rome.

In Portugal there is a popular revolt against the exactions of the Jesuits. In Spain, pampered child of the Papacy, the military are now called out to protect the lives and property of the members of the Catholic orders. In Austria and Germany the cry of, “Los von Rom” (Away from Rome), grows louder as the oppressions of clericalism grow more burdensome; and the most perplexing question of the day in the Philippines is the question of the return of the friars—a question that is fraught with the utmost danger, both to the United States and to the people of those islands. It has been asserted and reiterated that the friars were wholly responsible for the loss of the islands to Spain, and in the fear that the United States will reinstate the order lies the secret of the principal opposition to American government there. To many of them the fear of death is less dreaded than the fear of friar rule.

Mutterings and protests against oppression are heard in Finland, Poland, and Macedonia; and Russia herself is like a huge cauldron seething over the fires of Nihilism. The doctrines of the Jesuits have been held up to public ridicule in the French Chamber of Deputies, and to contempt and scorn in the legislative halls of Austria.

Thus in all parts of the world there is a reaching out after liberty—a popular revolt. In some countries the protest is against the oppression of the priesthood; in others it is against the exercise of despotic power on the part of the government.

The lesson set by America in her earlier history is bearing fruit in all quarters of the earth. In many instances, however, they have followed her a great way off. The example which she set was for a people’s government, by and for the people, and without the interference of pope or priest; that is, a government in which Church and State should be entirely and unequivocally separate.

But the fundamental principles of her government require that she have the same respect for the rights of all other peoples that she demands for those of her own people; that, while demanding self-government for herself she be willing to grant it to the people of all other lands, and help them by her example to attain to the fullest possible measure of both civil and religious liberty. That was the hope of her founders and that the theme of her orators for more than a hundred years. Now there comes a change. We thought we were the heralds of liberty; but when the forbidden fruit of pomp and world power was set before the eyes of the nation, it tasted and fell; and since then we have been hiding under every shrub of pretense, knowing full well that we have forfeited our right to be the tenders of the garden of liberty. Satan caused the glories of world dominion to pass before our eyes, and instead of saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” we fell down before the bauble, and lost the high estate we might have won in the estimation of the whole world; lost the real honor we might have had as teachers and leaders of the people; and, clutching the leading-strings of imperialism and monarchy, we became a part of the mixed multitude clamoring for the flesh-pots of Egypt.

It is well for us to learn the lesson there is for us in the upheaval now going on among the people of the earth. It is well for us also to know the place this country should have occupied before the world, as well as the position she will occupy when the final great test comes. She is now on the backward track, and the time will come when she will join the other nations of earth in giving power and honor to that power which demands the right to rule all men everywhere in both civil and religious things. The prophecy declares that she will abandon both of the great principles upon which the government was founded. She has abandoned one already, and the rest is sure to come. But the world has had its awakening in the popular revolt that is now in progress. The lines will be drawn more closely, the struggle become more bitter, until the great example of popular government shall speak “as a dragon” (Rev. 13:11), and cause men “to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.” Verse 12, etc. She will become the persecutor of those who “worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences.” That she will do these things inspiration has declared, and that she has begun to do them already the world knows. “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” has already begun to “perish from the earth.” But to the one who believes the Word of God this fact becomes the harbinger of a better government,—the government of the Lord Himself, by the Lord Himself, and for the benefit of the whole universe of God. The need for a popular revolt will no longer exist, but righteousness and peace shall kiss each other, and the meek inherit and inhabit the land forever.

C. M. S.