THE "AMERICAN SENTINEL."
By Editor
THE trend in every age and in every clime has been to unite religion with the civil power, and this in spite of the fact that all such unions have been a curse to both the church and the State, in that they have killed the spirituality of the church, and substituted a cold, dead formalism to be enforced by the State. The one grand and noble exception before the world is our own country, which, profiting by the experiences of others, received not the lessons of history in vain. The founders of this glorious republic chose the Christian principles of civil and religious liberty as the foundation upon which to build the superstructure, acknowledging to the world that men were equal before God, and that an establishment of religion, or the prohibition of the free exercise thereof, was wrong. This has made our nation "the beacon-light of liberty, civil and religious," and men have been left to themselves in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. But that unquenchable spirit that has been the curse of every age has not lain dormant, and the liberty that has been enjoyed has been at the price of "eternal vigilance." Little by little this dreaded evil has been thrusting itself upon the nation. History is repeating, and as the church has been losing the power of God, she has been courting and pleading for the power of the State, and already in many places throughout the land honest, God-fearing men and women have been made to feel the hand of oppression because of their choosing to worship the Lord according to the dictates of their own conscience. It was because these movements were foreseen, and were already taking shape, that the American Sentinel was sent forth on its mission. For fourteen years it has stood as the only journal in the United States wholly devoted to the Christian and American principles of complete separation of church and State, and for the defense of liberty of conscience; and, from the issues which are before us, we are persuaded that the American Sentinel should be in the hands of every citizen of the land. The paper is a sixteen-page weekly; the price is $1.00 per year, and the office of publication is 39 Bond Street, New York, N. Y. Sample copies will be sent on application.