THE EVIDENCE THAT “THIS IS A CHRISTIAN NATION.”
By W. N. G.
Although in common parlance the word “Christian” is understood to mean one who professes to follow Christ, it is generally conceded that a true Christian is one who does follow Christ. He may not have attained perfection, but he is a willing learner, and by faith walks in the light as far and as fast as truth is revealed. To be a Christian there must be a yielding of the individual heart to Christ in response to the drawing influence of the Spirit of God. “No man can come to me,” says Christ, “except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” John 6: 44. When we see the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5: 22, 23), or the Spirit of Christ exemplified in any individual, we may safely say that he is a Christian. Of an association of such persons we may say that it is a Christian body. But the mere assertion by any human authority that any person, or any body of people, is Christian does not make it so. In fact, where the fruit is lacking, where the conduct is at variance with the profession, it is generally admitted that an assertion of Christian character is a false assertion. The Supreme Court of the United States has asserted that “this is a Christian nation.” The National Reform Association—whose aims are at present sustained in the main by all the religious reform associations and nearly all the churches—has seized upon this declaration of the Supreme Court and made it a kind of watchword in its work of so-called reform. This dictum of a human court is the crowning evidence adduced that this is a Christian nation. When we look for evidence of a practical nature, such as would be admitted in the case of an individual, the president of the association gives us the following:— “The Constitution of the United States is the first instrument of government in American history framed without any distinct acknowledgment of Almighty God. The silence of the Constitution at this point has tended to the practical exclusion of God and his law from the realm of political life. Recent revelations of municipal iniquities have astonished the world. Vice is shielded for a price. Many officers of the law are accomplices of criminals. Few, if any, of our cities are free from these developments of political corruption. Other departments of government are also infected. Bribery vitiates the purity of elections and purchases legislation from lawmakers. Both the state and the national governments are in league with the liquor traffic. We license it for the revenue it yields, and fill our treasuries with the price of blood. We have deeply corrupted the family. More than twenty thousand divorces are granted every year in the United States, most of them on insufficient grounds; and both for these unlawful separations and for the adulterous marriages which follow them, the state assumes responsibility by placing upon them the sanction of the law. Laws for the protection of the sabbath and for the suppression of blasphemy are openly and shamelessly violated. In many cities, and in some whole states, the word of God has been banished from the public schools, and a purely secular plan of education, with its atheistic tendencies, has been adopted. These facts are not denied. They are known of all intelligent men.” The foregoing is taken from a published “Call for a National Reform Convention to be held in Baltimore, Md., in the North Avenue Baptist Church, on December 12 and 13, 1895.” It is signed by the president and twenty-one prominent representatives from different sections of the country, all but one (Anthony Comstock) being ministers of various denominations, several of them college presidents, and all but three bearing the title D.D. Yet these men hold up to the world a “moral agent” with the above admitted characteristics, and proclaim it Christian. And in doing so they accept the word of a human tribunal in preference to the testimony of the word of God. W. N. G.