In it we have acknowledged God in his relations to this country, and it would be redundancy for us to take up this matter again and put it in the federal Constitution. Furthermore, it would be illogical, for we have been called here for one purpose, 'to form a more perfect union.' All our deliberations must be limited to this line of thought, How can we make a strong, central government, and yet preserve, in a large measure, the sovereignty of the States?" And therefore the federal Constitution is a document that defines the relation between the State and general governments. It provides that religion or any other subject may be taken up by way of amendment, and in due time the matter of religion was so taken up. But before we consider the religious amendment let us more carefully examine the Constitution itself. All the principles of law found in that Constitution are taken, not from Solon, not from Lycurgus, not from Numa, but from Christ; and when we construe the Constitution and the Declaration together we have the first great instrument in human history that gives Christ's ideas of popular government. In the first article of the Constitution the President of the United States is granted his "Sunday" for rest. No matter how they may crowd upon his attention the measures that Congress has passed, he can demand as his constitutional right the Sunday free from business and annoyance; and this is a principle recognized only by the highest types of Christian government. In this same Constitution it is provided that Congress shall assemble on the first Monday of December," thus barring it forever from meeting on the Christian Sabbath and compelling it to begin its business on the first business day of the Christian week. Our fathers fixed the date of the Constitution upon two events, the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and that of the nation. 66 The first amendment to the federal Constitution, far from isolating the Christian religion, provides for its recognition; and Congress is not in any sense barred from religious legislation by this amendment, nor has Congress ever so understood it. Every Congress that has ever met has passed religious legislation. If one is in Washington on the first Monday in December, when the new Congress meets, he will see that the first business done in each house is organization, and that among the officers duly elected by ballot is a chaplain of the Christian religion. When a member of Congress is sick this holy man is expected to go see to him and minister to him, as a pastor. If he die, this chaplain is expected to bury him with Christian burial, as a pastor. In other words, each house of Congress is virtually organized into a Christian church, with a Christian minister as a pastor, exercising the general functions of the pastorate and drawing his salary out of our public treasury. But there are other ways in which Congress establishes the Christian religion. Every squadron that sails the seas and waves the Stars and Stripes carries not only an admiral to command but a chaplain of the Christian religion to preach and pray. When the soldiers of our army go away from the sweet face of mother, from the blessed influence of home, there is sent with every regiment not only a colonel to command but a chaplain of the Christian religion. In our reformatory institutions Christianity is taught at the expense of government. Take the history of the Indian Bureau. An order has been on the books there for thirty years to the effect that no man or woman shall be appointed a teacher in an Indian school who is not a professor of the Christian religion and a member in good standing of some Christian church. Congress has frequently appropriated large sums of money and put them in the hands of religious denominations, that they might carry on schools among the Indian tribes. So also in the United States Mint. On every large gold and silver coin that has been minted of recent years there is the sentiment, "In God we trust." In the Constitution of Georgia the preamble says, "Relying upon the protection and guidance of Almighty God." Every State constitution has in some form recognized Christianity. An hour would not suffice to bring out the many ways in which we have recognized and legislated as to Christianity and have made it the religion of the land. We close this paper with a brief consideration of "The Holy Trinity" case, which was decided in the United States Supreme Court February 29, 1892. Mr. Justice Brewer presented the opinion, the following being some of his conclusions: No purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, State or national, because this is a religious people. . . Every ... State constitution contains language which directly, or by clear implication, recognizes a profound reverence for religion and an assumption that its influence in all human affairs is essential to the well-being of the community. After citing the position which is taken by various constitutions the court then proceeds to say: ... There is a universal language pervading them all, having one meaning: They affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious people. . . . If we pass to a view of American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs, and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. Among other things note the following: The form of oath universally prevailing concludes with an appeal to the Almighty; the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayer; the preparatory words of wills, "In the name of God, Amen;" the laws respecting the observance of the Sabbath, with a general cessation of all secular business and the closing of courts, legislatures, and other similar public assemblies on that day; the churches and church organizations which abound in every city, town, and hamlet; the multitude of charitable organizations existing everywhere under Christian auspices; the gigantic missionary associations, with general support and aiming to establish Christian missions in every quarter of the globe. These and many other matters which might be noticed add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation. The writer has been in that court when the justices were much divided in opinion; when they stood five to four; and when each of the four presented a separate dissenting opinion. But when Mr. Justice Brewer read this opinion every other justice concurred. When that court from which there can be no appeal speaks by unanimous voice surely their judgment must be the law of the land. Ours is not a secular system; and, though we grant due courtesy to other faiths, the religion of our Constitution is the Christian. Edward Thomson EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS. THE great Congregational Council held in Boston in October glowed with spiritual intensity. The dominant note was ardently evangelical. The addresses which evoked the most instant, fervent, and unanimous response were those which exalted Jesus Christ as the God-man, Redeemer and Lord of mankind. The climax of fervor came with the paper of Dr. Forsyth, of Cambridge, on "The Evangelical Principle of Authority,” at the close of which the vast audience rose with one heart and voice to the adoring hymn, "In the cross of Christ I glory." CHRISTIANITY IN THE COLLEGES. A WRITER in The Coming Age on "True versus False Education," pointing out certain influences which tend to foster in America, as in Europe, the spirit of rationalism, to subvert morals, and to eliminate the religious element from man's nature, attributes all this largely to non-religious and otherwise defective educational systems. Similar notes of alarm, heard in numerous and widely differing quarters, serve to impress upon the Christian Churches their vast responsibility toward the work of education in this country. urgent duty than to see to it that positively and powerfully Christian. alleges a decay of character among us, and says that luxurious conditions and lax requirements are producing a set of men who are fiberless and weak, while religion itself drifts into a mass of ethical suggestions which generate little enthusiasm or motive power. His strenuous words on the proper preeminence of Christianity in our colleges so nearly express our own sentiments, which we were on the point of writing out, that we reproduce them here: They have no more education shall be made Another recent writer * This country is full of educated men who have no more definite ideas about the Christian religion than if they were educated in China or India. Each year there * Rev. A. A. Berle. comes forth from some universities a mass of men who are absolutely ignorant of what was formerly considered a sine qua non of a liberal education, namely, a thorough knowledge of the English Bible. The quotation from the Bible by public men reveals this in a degree which would be amusing if it were not so shocking. An educated Chinaman who knew as little about the sacred books of China as some of our alleged statesmen know about the Bible would be an impossibility. In a recent assembly in Boston a Harvard professor made a speech to five hundred men in which he alluded to the Bible twice, and each time misquoted it. Even the scholastic habit ought to have rendered this impossible. But the man probably knew so little about experimental religion, or had given to his personal religious life so little attention, that the incentive to a ripe scholasticism dominant everywhere else was absent when it came to the literature of religion. He was not scholastic about the Bible because he was not concerned about the religion of the Bible. Thus both religion as a practical matter and the university capacity in the matter of biblical knowledge and instruction suffered. A university professor of this type is an intellectual misfit in modern life. . . . It is of the highest importance that the university population shall receive training of a character which shall make the reenactment of the scene between Christ and Nicodemus impossible. We cannot afford in this country to have an educated class which is ignorant on the side of experimental religion. We cannot afford to have the educated youth of the country believe that all there is to Christianity is a scholastic belief in the Gospel as a survival of the fittest in religion. We cannot submit to having the educated mind of this land nominally Christian while experimentally it is essentially pagan. And in order that so great a calamity may not come upon us we need to demand of teachers that to all their scholastic and scientific qualities they shall add the highest education of all, the knowledge of God in a personal Christian character and communion. . . . When the question is raised of the relation of Christianity to the colleges the purely scholastic ideal steps in with the statement that the true university presents all religions and lets a man "prove all things and hold fast that which is good." But there never was an application of the university ideal that was so full of blunder as this. Does the department of history present the ideals of civilization prevailing in the fifteenth century as equal with those of the nineteenth and say, "Choose whichever you please?" Does the university say to the students who come to it, "Choose any kind of morality you please?" Why submit to a religious license and anarchy which would not be tolerated in fine arts or in geology? The professors of geology do not teach all things and then tell the students to pick out what suits them. They formulate what they believe to be true and expect the student to accept it. And yet, when Christian people want Christianity expressed with authority in definite and decided way, and made the dominant force in the life of the college, there is talk of "narrowness" and "bigotry " and the rest of that phraseology of scholastic non-religionists, and we are asked if we wish to coerce the nineteenth-century mind in the matter of religion. Coerce it just as it is coerced in the fine arts, in physics and chemistry, in geology and botany. The nineteenth century mind in religion is just as much rooted in the history of religion and of the Christian centuries as in geology it is rooted in the history of the globe. No university says to its students, "Decide for yourself whether you will adopt the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system." It says, "You will accept |