WORDS WORTH HEEDING by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 23, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 50.

WORDS WORTH HEEDING.

By Editor

WITHOUT expressing any opinion on Representative Geary's position on the Chinese question, we wish to emphatically indorse the following in his speech before the House, October 11:—

I have before me a petition from 225 ministers of the Des Moines conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. This petition in similar form has been sent here by all congregations. Issued from the same center—Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist—they all use the same blank.

What right has any American conference to ask of the American Congress that it shall do anything? What right has any conference in the land to say to the American Congress you must do this or you must do that?

I supposed that in this land the line was sharply drawn between the church and State; that the church must never lay hands on the government, and the government must never interfere with the church. I do not deny that every church member has a right given to another person, but he must petition as a citizen, standing on his right as such, and not invoke the powerful name of the church behind him.

I recognize the benefits of the church, but whenever the church mixes with politics, human liberty dies and man suffers. Because I am jealous of liberty I oppose now, as at all times, any interference of the church with American politics.

Will you admit the right of a Catholic archbishop of New York to rise in his pulpit and outline the policy of the American Congress? Are you willing to open up that Pandora's box and give the church the opportunity you are always howling against?

Brave words and well spoken. But this is just what the church has been doing for several years past, and is just what weak-kneed politicians in Congress have permitted her to do; not only permitted, but assisted in doing. Many petitions have been presented to Congress, said to express the sentiments of millions of petitioners; but many of these petitions have never been seen by the petitioners. They were "representative" of this church or that, of this religious body or that, and those who got them up were oftentimes the self constituted representatives of those said to be behind the petitions.

Happy would it have been for this nation if the Congress of the United States had answered in 1888, and especially in 1892, as Congress answered in 1829 and 1831:—

Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object . . . are always dangerous . . . If admitted, it may be justly apprehended that the future measures of the government will be strongly marked, if not eventually controlled, by the same influence. All religious despotism commences by combination and influence; and when that influence begins to operate upon the political institutions of a country, the civil power soon bends under it, and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequences.—American State Papers, p. 95.

But the government has not only failed to heed this prophecy, but the prophecies of God's word, and the prophecies of history written in letters of blood. The Pandora's box is opened; the republic is already in the toils of the religious combination. "We hold the United States Senate in our hands," said the Rev. H. H. George, D.D., in a speech in Paterson, N. J., August 7, 1892. And the same year, December 9, in a speech in Lansing, Mich., the same man said: "We can hold Congress in our hands and wield this country just as we please." And to this United States senators have shamelessly assented. Congress was indifferent, and yielded to the religious influence on the Sunday question; but in that they yielded every principle dear to every liberty-loving American. They may now reap the fruits of it in the rapid destruction of the republic; and the church by thus forsaking her Lord will meet a sadder fate. God has foretold her doom and warned his people in the eighteenth chapter of the Revelation.