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CORRECT PRINCIPLES

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 3, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 5.

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CORRECT PRINCIPLES.

By Editor

Glad That One Editor in Many Sees Them.

BISHOP FOLEY, of the Roman Catholic Diocese, of Detroit, Mich., celebrated his seventieth birthday a few days ago. A civic reception was tendered him by the mayor of the city. Twenty Lutheran ministers of Detroit, who had been invited to act upon the reception committee, sent a letter to the mayor declining, and in their letter they say: "We are loyal Americans, and our loyalty forbids us to do honor to a person representing a church which is opposed to the fundamental principles of our great country, and which condemns government by the people as boundless license."
Some will suppose these Lutheran ministers to be narrow in the extreme. If any distinguished citizen was about to celebrate his seventieth birthday, and his friends arranged an informal reception, and we resided in such a city and had the honor of an invitation, unless that citizen held some attitude, which seemed to us an immoral one, or stood for something antagonistic to the public welfare, we should gladly accept. But if the city undertook to give a reception to an ecclesiastic as such, we should decline to take any part in the matter. If the bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, resident in this city, Dr. Edward G. Andrews, for whom we have the highest personal respect and affection, were offered a civic celebration by the mayor of this city, we should conscientiously decline to attend. Our belief in the separation of Church and State as the only safeguard of human liberty is stronger than etiquette, stronger even than denominational affiliations.
When the two hundred clergymen of this city went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel to pay tribute of respect and political sympathy to James G. Blaine, on the day that the mouth of the celebrated Dr. Burchard was set a-going while his judgment had "gone away on a visit," we were pressed to go, but abruptly and persistently refused to do so on the ground that we had never known any permanent good results to come to any cause or party by demonstrations of the clergy, as such, in any party political movement.—Christian Advocate.