THE SPIRIT OF STATE CHURCHISM.
THE persecution of the Jews in Russia is by a state church that calls itself Christian. As showing how Christ has to bear the blame of all that is done in His name, we give the following incident that occurred in a Jewish mission meeting in Brooklyn, N. Y. At a certain stage of the meetings, the people in the audience were given privilege to talk, or to ask questions. Then a Jew, reading extracts from a letter, related how his father-in-law had escaped the murderers' hands in a marvelous way, but that his wife and two children whom he had left until he could provide a home for them in America, had been cruelly killed. The rioters just took one of the children and threw it into the air as high as they could, and when the mother ran screaming to catch her child, they held her back, making her see its death as it came down on the pavement with an awful crash. They repeated this torture with the other child, and then putting kerosene oil on the mother's clothing, they tied her to a pole and set fire to her. "Now how can you," said this man, "open your mouth and talk to us about Jesus through whom all this trouble has come?" This is a striking illustration of state churchism, where it has full sway, no matter what the profession. It is only the education of common civilization, through religious liberty, that holds back any state religion from like excesses. The spirit is always the same. The past and present (in certain quarters) demonstrate this fact, and the future is to witness its universal tyranny again, as the prophecy testifies, which the outlook of the world is fast corroborating. It was not the religion of Jesus which incited to the above deeds, but its utter perversion. A Jew is safer nowhere than among true Christians. A Russian Jew may not know this; he has seen only the perversion of Christianity in Russia, perhaps. But every observing Jew in free lands knows to the contrary.