THE PRINCIPLE APPLIES BOTH WAYS.
By L. A. Phippeny
Here and there, and more frequently as time goes on, the Roman Catholic question crops out and gets in the way of Protestants. Recently, says the Christian Advocate, in its Baltimore Letter, the Emmet Club, a local Roman Catholic organization, petitioned the City Council and the Legislature of Maryland to set apart as a municipal and state holiday March 25, the day to be known as Colonists’ day. The Baltimore City Ministerial Union has protested, and sent a counter document to the mayor, City Council, governor, and members of the Legislature. In this, the ground is taken that the day “is not needed as a holiday; it would be the celebration of an historical event which enters a disputed domain; and it deals with a matter having ecclesiastical bearing and relating to religion, which should not properly become the province of the state.” The objection, especially in its last feature, is well taken. Now, while I do not wish to appear as making a fling at some Protestants, yet it seems that a principle can be seen and defined by many when there is a prospect of Roman Catholicism creeping into state recognition. There is now before Congress a bill to amend the Constitution of the United States so as to embody a recognition of God and of Jesus Christ in the fundamental law of this nation. There is also a bill providing for a Sunday rest law, and these are backed up by nearly all the great Protestant churches of the land, who are pushing with might and main for their passage. Where now does the principle that religion “should not properly become the province of the state” come in? Is not the principle as clearly to be seen where other than the Roman Catholic religion is concerned? Perhaps there is a beam in the way. But right at this point is located one of the great unalterable reasons why the provinces of church and state should be kept forever separate. First, religion is a matter of the conscience, between the individual and his God alone. Second, the state is a civil affair, dealing with man’s outward relations with his fellow-men. The state never can make a man religious by law, and any attempt to do so will result only in oppression, persecution, or the making of hypocrites. The oppression and injustice arise from the establishing and enforcing by law certain doctrines or principles which some individual or body of citizens in the nation can not accept and obey without violating their natural right to worship God, or not to worship him, according to the dictates of8 (136)their own conscience. As witness the watchful jealousy with which the Protestant Ministerial Union of Baltimore descries and denounces the appearance of Catholicism in its overtures for state recognition. Is the principle wrong for Roman Catholics and right for Protestants? Or is it right for the latter because they are in the majority, and in the United States only? Then the principle is right for Mohammedans in Turkey and Armenia; right in Russia, where the Stundists are recipients of its benefits; right in Brazil, where Catholicism holds sway, and Bibles are burned by order of the priest; right in China, where Christian missionaries are depicted as worshipers of the swine, missions burned, and Christian men and women slaughtered; the Inquisition and the black works of the Dark Ages were right, for they were commanded by the civil law, behind which was the Roman system. No, the majority plea, or for the good of all, or the greatest number, will not work satisfactorily to all. For then might the tables be turned in all justice should the Jew, or Buddhist, or any particular sect of Protestants even, constitute a majority at any time in our own nation. Equal and exact justice to all must demand an honest adherence to the principle of keeping the church and the state everlastingly apart. Nevertheless, the nation is practically committed to legislation upon the question, and professed ministers of Christ, who defined in unmistakable language the true provinces of the church and of the state, are apparently totally blinded by a false zeal to their own eternal interests and the principles of true religious liberty. With them, and under their lead, are the rank and file, who, not understanding, perhaps, the significance of the move, are lending their influence to the same disastrous end, for the end can only be disaster to the individual and to the nation. Would that all could see and would apply at home the principle as clearly as it has been outlined by the ministers of Baltimore, who it is sincerely to be hoped may themselves realize the scope of their resolution.