BUILDING THE THINGS THEY DESTROY.
It is strangely anomalous that so many of the religious journals in the United States are commending the efforts of France and Spain to throw off the union of the state with the church, while at the same time they so energetically encourage the principles of such union in our own country. They seem oblivious to the fact that all religious legislation is simply progress toward that end. The very first union of the Christian church with the Roman state began to take practical shape with the Sunday-rest laws of Constantine. That was an opening wedge, and as the church’s influence in the state waxed stronger, the Sunday laws were made more stringent, until it became heresy, with a penalty of excommunication, attended by bitter persecution, for any one to observe the “Sabbath according to the commandment.” Yet in the face of this historical fact, most of the popular religious journals are advocating the enforcement of Sunday observance by state and national law. And it is safe to predict that this religious clamor will continue until the goal of the church and state union shall be reached. When men pursue any object blindly, ignoring the logical results as manifest in the experiences of past generations, they are sure to go beyond their original expectations. If Christian men would sit down and count what it cost the church in the earlier centuries to take their stand on Sunday observance enforced by the state, they would hesitate to repeat the experiment. That we have not reached the limit of such experience yet is no argument that persistent development of the root will not eventually bring forth the tree and its fruit. All the processes of evil are developing their fruits extremely fast in these last days, and none more so than those which go forward in the garb of political religion.