“IS THIS A CHRISTIAN NATION?”
By U. G. Adkins
THIS was the theme of Dr. White’s discourse in this city (Oakland, Cal.) recently, in the course of which he uttered some palpable truths, words which should be often proclaimed if our country is to be saved from a deluge of despotism as black as that of the Dark Ages. Coming from one connected with and representing that large body of professing Christians who have bent every energy to get local, state, and national law-making powers committed to religious legislation, his words should have no little weight with the thinking public. He says: This allegiance to Christ is voluntary, not compelled or coerced. True faith can not be forced. It can not be planted in the hearts of the people by statutes or laws, but only can be written there by the hand of God. Christianity would gain no real power over the people by being declared the state religion and placed in the Constitution. The worst calamity which ever happened to Christianity was when it was made the religion of the Roman empire under Emperor Constantine. A thousand years of perversion of it followed. Let us thank God that in these United States the supremacy of Christ is not by edict, but by the unconstrained, untrammeled love of the hearts of free people. This is God’s plan for us. To all of which every lover of liberty should say, Amen. But since “like causes always produce like results,” and if “the worst calamity which ever happened to Christianity was when it was made the religion of the Roman empire under Emperor Constantine,” would any better thing befall it were it now made the religion of the United States?—Assuredly not! And since, back there, “a thousand years of perversion of it followed,” for the simple reason, as the historian says, that “the church often used the state for the furtherance of her own ends,” would not the church down here, through her ministers, use the state also for the furtherance of selfish interests?—Of course she would, and one can even now get an inkling of what would be done, in some respects, by the way in which the Reform Bureau at Washington is abusing the franking privilege—for the wholesale distribution of literature at the government’s expense. And this, saying nothing of the many other evils that would surely follow—from defrauding the mails to persecuting dissenters, from the thumbscrew and the stocks to the whipping-post and the stake. But Dr. White makes the mistake of saying: The fact of religious liberty’s being granted is one of the best proofs that this is a Christian nation, for that is the spirit of true Christianity. Let me ask, Who is it that grants this liberty? Who has the right, either ecclesiastical or civil, to grant me that liberty? I would also ask, If religious liberty is the spirit of true Christianity, could that liberty, as to the observance of any religious institution, be denied to anybody by the state, and that state still be a Christian state? If not, and of course it could not, then, when this nation, which is claimed to be Christian, shall take Sunday, a religious institution, and place it by act of legislation in the statute law of the land, is it not “the best proof” that this is not a Christian nation? Dr. White most truthfully says: Yet none of the matters enumerated are the real proofs that this is a Christian nation. It is not in constitutions, codes, laws, institutions, and public declarations that the real loyalty to Christ is proven, but in the heart-faith of the people. So, then, let us “preach the Word,” in order that “Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith” unto the end, that victory may be sure.
U. G. ADKINS.