The Religious Amendment.
By Uriah Smith
The following from the Index, we copy from the Christian Statesman of Jan. 2, 1875. We do not indorse its statements as applied to real Christianity, but it probably expresses the view which will be taken of this matter by the churches generally, and so may be regarded as an indication of the course that will be pursued by them. While the political religionist can see in present movements the prelude of a mighty revolution, we believe it to be the same that students of prophecy have for years been led by the word of God to expect. The Index says:— “Nothing could be more apparent, to one who intelligently followed the argument from its own premises, than that this movement expresses at once the moral and the political necessities of Christianity in this country. It is not a question of words, but rather a question of the vital interests of great institutions. Christianity must either relinquish its present hold on the government,—its Sunday laws, its blasphemy laws, its thanksgivings and fasts, its chaplaincies, its Bible in schools, and so forth,—or else it must secure the necessary condition of retaining all these things by inserting some guarantee of their perpetuity in the National Constitution. Looking simply at the small present dimensions of the movement,—at the fewness of its devoted workers, the paucity of attendants at the late convention, and the indifference of the public at large,—one is justified in dismissing it from consideration as of immediate importance. But, whoever is qualified to detect great movements in their germs, and to perceive that instituted Christianity is in vast peril from the constant inroads of rapidly spreading disbelief of dogmatic Christianity,—whoever is able to discern the certainty that the claims of Christianity to mold political action in its own interest, must sooner or later be submitted for adjudication to the supreme law of the land, by which they are not even verbally recognized,—will not fall into the superficiality of inferring the future fortunes of this movement, either from the mediæval character of its pretensions or the present insignificance of its success. It may possibly be that the Christian churches do not really care for their own existence, and are prepared to surrender it without a struggle; but we do not so read history. So soon as they come to comprehend fully the fact that their legal ‘Sabbath,’ their Bible in schools, and all their present legal privileges, must one by one slip away inevitably from their grasp, unless they defend them in the only possible way by grounding them on Constitutional guarantees, it seems to us an irresistible conclusion from history and experience that they will arouse themselves to protect these possessions as infinitely important. If they do not, they have achieved a degree of moral rottenness, cowardice, and hypocrisy which we are very slow to attribute to them. These champions of a Christianized Constitution are to-day the POLITICAL BRAIN of the Christian church. Conceding their premises, which are simply those of the universal Evangelical communion, it is impossible to deny their conclusions. It is these premises that we dispute—not the logicalness of the conclusions themselves; and although we hold that the same premises, if further carried out, must lead to the Roman Catholic position expressed by the Vatican decrees, we none the less admit the necessity of traveling that road from the starting-point, if it is once fairly entered upon. Hence we are as strongly convinced as ever that the Christian Amendment movement contains the germ of a demand that must sooner or later be heard asserted with perilous emphasis, by the body of orthodox Christian churches.”