p. 9 | PURITANISM

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 26, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 13.

PURITANISM

What Its Restoration Means.

“O for the reign of the Puritan!” “O for the breath of the Puritan!” “O for an Oliver Cromwell to lead our hosts!” are stock phrases among many of our modern national reformers and Christian citizens. The aim of these reformers is to put in office only Christian men, to elect Christian legislators, who can, we presume, present a duly authorized Christian citizenship certificate. Well, in brief, their aim is a Christian nation, Christian state, and Christian rulers by law.

This attempt is no new thing under the sun. It is Roman Catholicism, and the first centuries of the Christian era lived over again. Then they promised themselves that righteousness would be triumphant, swords would be beaten into plowshares, and peace would everywhere reign; but the Dark Ages followed. Puritanism in England aimed at the same thing. There were then as now many candidates for Christian legislators. “Pious” men were wanted; how could they be tested? Let Macaulay tell:—

“To know whether a man was really godly was impossible. But it was easy to know whether he had a plain dress, lank hair, no starch in his linen, no gay furniture in his house; whether he talked through his nose and showed the whites of his eyes; whether he named his children Assurance, Tribulation, Maher-shalal-hash-baz; whether he avoided Spring Garden when in town, and abstained from hunting and hawking when in the country; whether he expounded hard scriptures to his troop of dragoons, and talked in a committee of ways and means about seeking the Lord. These were tests which could easily be applied. The misfortune was that they were tests which proved nothing. Such as they were they were employed by the dominant party. And the consequence was that a crowd of imposters in every walk of life began to mimic and to caricature what were then regarded as the outward signs of sanctity.”

And what was the result of this effort for a “Christian nation” by law?—Again let Macaulay give the result:—

“But under this show, sensuality, ambition, avarice, and hatred retain unimpaired power; and the seeming convert has only added to the vices of a man of the world all the still darker vices which are engendered by the constant practice of dissimulation. The truth can not be long concealed. The public discovers that the grave persons, who are proposed to it as patterns, are more utterly destitute of moral principle and of moral sensibility than avowed libertines. It sees that these Pharisees are farther removed from real goodness than publicans and harlots. And, as usual, it rushes to the extreme opposite to that which it quits. It considers a high religious profession as a sure mark of meanness and depravity. On the very first day on which the restraint of fear is taken away, and on which men can venture to say what they feel, a frightful peal of blasphemy and ribaldry proclaims that the short-sighted policy which aimed at making a nation of saints has made a nation of scoffers.”

It will be no different now than then. “Righteousness exalteth a nation,” but righteousness can come only through personal faith in Jesus Christ; there is no other way. The righteousness of a nation is but the aggregate of its individual righteousness. It can not be put up in job lots. Political Christianity is the same essentially, breeding tyranny, hypocrisy, and persecution, whether it be called Catholic, Puritan, or Protestant.