THE UNITED STATES IN PROPHECY.
By A. H. Cleaves
In examining the subject of the American nation in the light of prophecy, a desire to separate facts from appearances and opinions should certainly be paramount. And especially in this day of lawlessness in thought as well as action, when men prefer in matters of religion the vagaries of their own imagination to the realities of God’s word, we should be ready to say with the apostle, “I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ hath not wrought by me, to make the Gentiles obedient, by word and deed.” Let us realize that the nations of earth have a place in the providence of God, that they are not the results of mere accident or human invention; and then, with the lamp of prophecy in our hand, let us cast around among the facts of history in the past, and of society at the present, and see if we can find the true position of the United States among the nations of the world. And here at the outset we may safely assume that with nations, as with individuals, all their practices and reforms exist first in sentiment; and so in order to a correct forecast of a nation’s conduct it will be necessary that we discover the disposition of that class in society who control the government and shape the policy of the nation. In entering upon an inquiry of this kind, among the first things to attract our attention is the attitude of the people and their leaders. Theoretically, this is a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people;” but the great majority of men in practice are not capable nor desirous of self-government; so that their liberty is really exercised in the choice of their leaders, as men exercise their choice in selecting a physician from the different schools, although in any case they commit their welfare into the hands of another, generally from the force of appearances rather than reason. So of a great many familiar terms, the masses have an impression that they are arbitrary and fixed in their meaning, whereas they are frequently vague and undefined; and so far from being words of a plain and limited sense, understood by leaders in church and state, they are complex and difficult many times, and far from being positive expressions even with magistrates. Thus we have State rights, and national rights, apparently very simple terms; but they admit of a wide difference in their application in different minds: and so the expressions, liberty, morality, laws of God, laws of nature, church and State, freedom, intolerance and a host of others. So we shall find upon inquiry that the questions of law and government, of what American liberty consists in, and, in short, what was the design and intention of the founders of the constitution, so far from being settled, are the great political problems of American statesmen to-day. These are questions that had an answer undoubtedly in the minds of the founders of this government, for with them morality and religion had a definite meaning; but the latter depended for their place in the government not so much upon legal expression as upon the will of the people. So long, therefore, as public sentiment remains undivided, everything goes smoothly; but when a native and foreign element enters and threatens to overturn the existing order of things, and to supersede law and morality by licentiousness and immorality, then a hidden national life begins to assert itself, and a moral and religious element that had existed before by tacit consent, now comes forward and demands a public recognition, and a place in the statute books of the land. And this brings us to the inquiry, Who are the aspirants to the seat of government, and what are the sentiments which they wish to enforce? At the close of the late war in this country a book was published, entitled, “History of the Great Republic,” by “Jesse T. Peck, D. D.,” the object of which, in the language of the author, was “to examine the history of the United States from a Christian standpoint;” and representing, as we think it does, the temper of the dominant class in this country, we shall draw upon its statements to prove our own position in relation to the United States in prophecy. It is especially interesting to study this author, as he professedly attempts to ascertain the position of the great American Republic in the scheme of a general providence; and also as he is a fair representative of that class of men, who, with sanguine views of the gospel in its influence upon the world, see everything in a rose-colored light, and prophecy long ages of human prosperity and progress. Thus, on p. 211, he says: “The rising, towering grandeur of moral ideas and events indicate to us the strong probability that the world has not yet passed its vigorous youth.” And again, p. 344, in speaking of the influence of the American press and church, and the mission of the great Republic of America among the governments of earth, he says the source of their power is with God. “It is the Sovereign of nations, God Omnipotent, who ‘maketh the wrath of man to praise him,’ unfolding the plans of the Christian dispensation, purging the people by the fires of law and justice; it is the gospel, the potent, at length the nearly omnipotent, spread of truth from Heaven; a free, open Bible; the baptisms of light and love, which are fast converting our nineteenth century into one grand Pentecost. It is the voice of resurrection, saying, ‘Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.’” This is a fair picture of the pervading spirit in the churches of America to-day; and it is interesting in this connection to examine the same author’s view of the church in its relation to the state. Here we meet with such expressions as “The new American Church,” “The Church of the new nation” and their expositions. On p. 692, he says, “It must not, however, be assumed, that in America we have only a confused mass of conflicting sects.” “Such an opinion of American Christianity would be wholly superficial and untrue. In the great object of worship, the true Jehovah, in simple, absolute dependence upon a common Saviour, in the pervading power of the new life, we are and always have been one.” As an illustration of the connection between church and State, which he condemns, we quote the following: “There is a sense in which we can speak of the Church of England as we shall never be able to speak of the Church of the United States of America. Episcopalianism is established by law in England. It is the legal religion of the kingdom; all other forms of worship are tolerated merely. This, let us trust, will never be true of any denomination in the Great Republic.” It will readily be seen by this that he makes a distinction without a difference; for what one denomination secures in England he makes a combination obtain here; at least, in the department of morals. The difference is in the method and not in the results; for a coalition of sects under the title of Evangelical Church is as much a State church when exercising political authority as a single denomination would be in the same situation. Thus he says: “We have reversed the theories of Europe. For a thousand years they have sought unity by repression; we have found it in liberty; and the unity of Christian work is the grandest, most potential fact of the age. The new American Church will therefore be, not the Church of prescriptive dogma, but, in a sense, higher, stronger, than the old, the Church of vitalized and harmonized action.” Now what does all this mean, reduced to practice? It simply means that the people of this generation do voluntarily what in former ages popes and princes prescribed to them; as a man upon coming of age walks by the same rules that his father laid down for him while under his authority. Tyranny and oppression, as Lieber teaches in his treatise on civil liberty, are not essentially connected with an imperial form of government any more than is liberty with a republican; yet a great many people seem to have obtained this impression. For the worst kind of despotism is that of a government by the people when the people are without moral principle. For as the injury that a combination of men can do is greater than that which one can accomplish, so is a bad government in a republic worse than one in a monarchy. This parade of evangelical and national unity in matters of religion is false at the outset: it assumes that the conflict of opinions lies between faith in the Bible and atheism, which is not strictly true. There are denominations certainly not infidel in their doctrine that are emphatically outside of the so-called evangelical church, whose views would be outlawed by that body as heretical. And here we may well inquire, What is liberty, and what is lawful? and what is intolerance? We remember reading several months since, in a number of the Atlantic Monthly, an article on intolerance, in which the writer endeavored to justify its exercise, seemingly on the ground of its being the expression of the popular will. He defined it to mean all legal compulsion for moral ends. He thought that if persecution of a religious nature should arise in the future, it would be characterized by the absence of that barbarism74which existed in the dark ages, both in the government of the church and of the State; and concluded by saying that he thought the wide diversity in religious opinion furnished a safe barrier to the appearance of such a religious oppression for a great while to come. But if we compare this writer with the author we have quoted, and with facts, we may find good reasons to differ from his conclusion. The disposition among the nominal churches seems to be to ignore denominational distinctions, or at least to suppress them in public, and to combine on points of mutual agreement. But is it true that any act of political persecution is just because in harmony with popular opinion? We think not. Popular opinion, under the reign of popes and kings, sanctioned their conduct in persecuting the martyrs; and why is it any more reliable when it speaks through its own chosen governors? The evil in human governments at the present time, we think, consists not so much in theory as in practice. Liberty is generally understood not to mean license to do wrong, but right; and what is right is determined, at least in Christian nations, not by human opinion, but by the revealed will of God, by the Bible. Intolerance, then, is not the proper restraints of law, but the ascendancy of wrong over right by legal means. The principles then laid down by the author of the “History of the Great Republic” we indorse; for he says, p. 704, “God is the Sovereign. We know his will. We know that as our Sovereign he forbids us to worship idols; to be a nation of swearers, murderers, or adulterers; to steal, bear false witness, or covet houses or beasts, people or lands, which belong to our neighbors; that he requires us to keep sacred the holy Sabbath, and to honor fathers and mothers; to love him with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves.” And again, p. 324, “God is the great Sovereign of nations; no law, no usage, however venerable in precedent or high in authority, is to be considered legitimate or permanent, if at war with the will of God.” The last quotation he thinks expresses the religion of the Great Republic; and it may in theory, but we think the sequel will show that it does not in practice.