NO CHRISTIAN NATIONS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 17, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 23.

NO CHRISTIAN NATIONS.

THE religion of man has many different forms, all manifesting his unregenerate nature and passions; and the religion of the Turk is one of them. This religion has always united itself with the power of the State, man's government; and the world has been cursed by the unnatural union and its monstrous progeny of persecution and bloodshed.

Christianity, the life and power of God in Christ Jesus and his Gospel, comes down to the world possessing a power above, distinct, and apart from all these. There are no Christian nations or Christian governments as such. As soon as men attempt to crystallize Christianity into law, they get but a dead form; the life has fled. It can not be bound and confined by the creeds of councils or the laws of men. A curse of the world to-day, a weighty incubus upon our foreign missions, is the idea that these missionaries and missions represent Christian nations,—that England, with her oppression of India, her rum in Africa, her opium in China, is "Christian;" that America, with her law-enthroned plutocracy, her exports of rum and tobacco to heathen lands, her seemingly corrupt governments, national, State, and municipal, is "Christian." And for all these crimes our missionaries and missionary journals apologize and mourn. In the name of the blessed Christ, why do they not say the living truth, America is not "Christian" except in name. Nor England, nor Greece, nor Spain is "Christian," however they may call themselves such. Christianity is a matter of individual life and relation in Jesus Christ to every soul that believes. Let the church and her children preach that, and leave the political problems to God and the world, instead of using the Babylonian plan of force to execute God's decrees, and reaping the sure reward of death from her own poison wine.