“If any man hear My words and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.”
—Jesus the Christ.
“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school. . . . Keep the Church and State forever separate.”
—U. S. Grant.
Christianity and Earthly Power
The ark of God was never taken till it was surrounded by the arms of earthly defenders. In captivity, its sanctity was sufficient to vindicate it from insult, and to lay the hostile fiend prostrate on the threshold of his own temple. The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave. To such a system it can bring no addition of dignity or of strength that it is part and parcel of the common law. *
The whole history of Christianity shows that she is in far greater danger of being corrupted by the alliance of power, than of being crushed by its opposition. Those who thrust temporal sovereignty upon her, treat her as their prototypes treated her Author. They bow the knee, and spit upon her; they cry “Hail!” and smite her on the cheek; they put a scepter in her hand, but it is a fragile reed; they crown her, but it is with thorns; they cover with purple the wounds which their own hands have inflicted on her; and inscribe magnificent titles over the cross on which they have fixed her to perish in ignominy and pain.
—From Macaulay’s Essay on “Southey’s Colloquies.”
