Power From the Wrong Source by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 29, 1914

Power From the Wrong Source

By C. M. S.

IN spite of the fact that the American government stands upon the principle of the separation of the church from the state, the federated churches have deliberately adopted a plan which contemplates nothing else than the use of the power and influence of the state in the furtherance of the church's aims. In the very making of that plan, the Federal Council of the Churches acknowledged its own lack of power; and the laying of the plan was in reality a declaration of purpose to secure from a material source the power denied them by the Holy Author of their religion. Their purpose is more than simply to compel lawmakers to heed and respect their wishes. It is to compel lawmakers to yield to their demands, and, in yielding, to put the power of the state at their command. In other words, the spiritual power they lack will be made up for by having the state under their control and using its power to accomplish their aims.

For years this combination of churches has worked and prayed for a Sunday law for the District of Columbia. From thousands of pulpits fervent prayers have been addressed to heaven year after year, and yet the law has not been passed. Either Jehovah has not heard, or, hearing, he has not been pleased with the request, and it has been denied.

But now the Federal Council is determined to have what they want whether God wants them to have it or not. They have not been able to get it from God, and now they will get it without him—they will compel the state to give it to them, and give it whether it wants to or not. It is a most dangerous thing to insist upon having something that God has denied us. The records of God's dealings with his people show that more than once he has permitted his people to have what they demanded because they persisted in their demand, and would have it even against his will; but in every case it has spelled disaster. And so will it prove in this case if finally the federated churches succeed in getting the state to answer the prayers which Jehovah refused to answer.

In the January issue of the Christian Union Quarterly, Rev. Chas. S. Macfarland has an article on "The Federal Unity of the Churches," in which occurs this striking paragraph:—

Over against these divided and oftentimes conflicting forces we witnessed the problems of the new social order. The foes of that order were all united, and the divided churches were facing federated vice, federated saloons, united political corruption, cooperative human exploitation, and these all bound together in one great federation of commercialized iniquity. Labor was federated. Capital was federated. They were girded for the conflict, and were awaiting the voice of the church. Problems of social justice were piteously beseeching, and we stood with shame on our faces, bewildered and confused because our divided spiritual authority was not equal to our human sympathy. We saw that, because of the divided moral forces of the church, we were losing our civic virtue, our sabbath, our temperate ways, as well as our temperance laws, our sons, our daughters. The rich were leaving us for their degrading revelries, and the poor were leaving us because we had not moral power enough to restrain an industry that devoured widows' houses and bound heavy burdens upon the people grievous to be borne.

What is this but a plain abandonment of the ways of the gospel, and a shaping of the course of the church after the ways adopted by the world for the accomplishing of worldly aims? Labor was federated, capital was federated, vice was federated—and the church must follow their example and federate also. And why must it do this?—Because the church was lacking in "moral power." But the church's source of moral power is not in federated labor nor in federated capital nor in federated vice. God has given the church a higher and purer source of power than that. "Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." This acknowledgment of a lack of power is an acknowledgment of a lack of the indwelling presence and direction of the Holy Spirit; and that lack can never be supplied by following the tactics of federated labor, federated capital, or federated vice. When Christians go onto the devil's own ground to fight him with his own weapons, they are sure to lose.

The need of God's people is not now, nor has it ever been, an aping of the ways of the world, nor power and force in worldly affairs. God has never promised his church power to compel men or nations to do what they do not choose to do. He has never commissioned his church to force the state or the individual to accept his law and make it the rule of government or of life. The subjects of God's kingdom must be subjects by choice, never by compulsion.

Dr. Macfarland speaks of the shamefacedness and confusion and bewilderment of the churches because of their divided spiritual authority. Then the plan of the federated churches is that, through the securing of greater material power, there shall be a united spiritual authority. Woe worth the day when that condition comes into the professed church of Christ. The world groaned under that awful burden all through the Dark Ages. Spiritual authority was what Rome claimed and exercised during that fearful period, the most dismal and bloody in the history of the world.

What can the church want of spiritual authority, except to exercise it? And when we find the federated churches of the world exercising spiritual authority in the world again, we shall find again the conditions that made the Papacy what it was; and when we have that, what have we but the Papacy over again? And the Papacy over again is the "image of the beast." Is it not significant that this movement to unite the churches and reinstate spiritual authority had its inception in the United States, and is laying its plans to create here that image of other days?

Such declarations as the above show us that we have not been wrong in the interpretation of prophecy, and they show us also the gradual development of the conditions we have so long predicted. There can be no question that we are in the days of the closing of the controversy. And this should cause each Seventh-day Adventist to ask himself whether or not he is just where God wants him to be, and is doing the work God wants him to do. C. M. S.