“The Fifty-second Congress, which expired by limitation on March 4, will not be remembered,” says the Observer of this city, “as a body of great accomplishments.” This is a cruel and ungrateful thing, for a paper which has all along advocated Sunday closing, to say of the first National Religious Congress of the United States.
A DISPATCH to the New York Times, states that there is a religious war in Columbus, Ohio, between a Protestant faction and the Catholics over elections to the school board. The American Protective Association, representing Protestants, will undertake to control the election next month. This association has been denounced by Dr. Washington Gladden.
A CORRESPONDENT of the Boston Pilot, writing of the Catholic Congress to be held in Chicago early in September, says:
Although the Catholic Congress, which is to be the first of the religious congresses, stands upon a basis of its own and claims for itself absolute independence of all of them, being the rightful successor of the Baltimore Congress, and projected before the series of World Congresses was planned or even thought of, it has also a place among the various congresses, and will therefore attract the attention, not only of Catholics, but of people of all creeds, and this in a far greater degree than did even the Congress held in Baltimore in 1889.
The week beginning September 4 will, it is expected, be exclusively and distinctively “Catholic week.” Chicago, during that week, will present a remarkable spectacle,—in the words of a rabid Methodist preacher, it will undoubtedly appear that the whole population has “gone over to Rome.” Such an opportunity of placing itself fairly and squarely before the American people has never before been offered to the Catholic Church of America. And that opportunity will be utilized to the fullest extent.
The remarkable activity of the Catholics and their rapidly increasing popularity are certainly ominous.
THE Colorado Sun, of February 5, has this pertinent paragraph:—
One of the fundamental principles upon which this Government was established, was the entire separation of Church and State. This means something more than that there shall be no church recognized and supported by the State. It means that the State shall never legislate for the indorsement, maintenance and enforcement of the doctrines or requirements of any church merely because they are such. It means that the State shall never embody in its laws the rules and ordinances of any system of religion simply because they claim or even possess the divine sanction.
This is quite true, for Government can, of right, have nothing to do with divine sanctions. Governments are instituted for the securing of natural rights, not for the defining of moral duties.
It is a strange idea that some people have that civil law is based upon the Decalogue, and that though the State has no right to define or enforce religious obligation, it is not only its right but its duty, to legislate upon that portion of the divine law that defines social duties. The fact is that civil rights and a practical recognition of them long antedate the giving of the law upon Mount Sinai. Inalienable rights are God-given, and the inherent sense of them is God-implanted; so that it was always true, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that “it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal;” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
ANY mother of little children sending a list of twenty young mothers to the Kindergarten Literature Co., Woman's Temple, Chicago, will receive a copy of the beautiful new Kindergarten magazine for children, called Child-Garden. It is the most practical magazine in the nursery. $1 per year.
Battle Creek Sanitarium Health Foods
THE unequalled health foods manufactured by the Sanitarium Health Food Company are neither made nor sold by others than their authorized agents. The Rural Health Retreat, St. Helena, Cal., is authorized to manufacture our Granola and most of our other health foods for the Pacific Coast. The Union College is authorized to manufacture Granola in Lincoln, Neb., and to supply the members of the Seventh-day Adventist Conference living in that State. Our Granola and other special health foods are not manufactured by any other parties.
SANITARIUM HEALTH FOOD CO.
Battle Creek, Mich.
AMERICAN SENTINEL.
Set for the defense of liberty of conscience, and therefore uncompromisingly opposed to anything tending toward a union of Church and State, either in name or in fact.
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