The Cause of It All

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 3, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 27.

The Cause of It All.

This fiendish act of religious tyranny, this infamous politico-ecclesiastical crime, and its consequent atrocities, robbed France within three years of one million of the choicest of her population, paralyzed all her industries, and "ruined the best elements of her religious and social life." It is difficult to form a just conception of the extent, the vindictiveness, and the atrocious cruelties that characterized the persecutions to which those exemplary citizens and Christians were subjected at the hands of the authorities both civil and ecclesiastical. But it was all the legitimate fruit of a close union between the Church and the State.

It is safe to say that 50,000,000 persons have suffered death for conscience' sake since the days of Nero. Not one of these would have suffered if the Church and the State had always let each other alone. Small wonder, then, that the choicest spirits of the human race have ever been the uncompromising champions of religious and political liberty. We are not surprised, then, that their Prototype was none less than the Lord Jesus Christ, the Founder of the only religion that can make men free, and keep them free both in time and in eternity.