abstract: the nation, or the state, in the sense of that word in international law, is a moral agent, or a being with true moral character and accountability. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being and attributes and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to Him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues;--these never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community.

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by David McAllister

Editor's Note: This article, which will appear in two parts, is an edited version of chapter 4, "The Philosophical Basis of the Movement," from David McAllister's book, Christian Civil Government in America: The National Reform Movement, Its History and Principles (Pittsburgh: The National Reform Association, 1927; sixth edition, Rev. T. H. Acheson and Wm. Parsons). Although the historical circumstance of an America with a largely Christian consensus has changed since McAllister's day, the principles of political science set forth here have not. These principles, along with the explicit scriptural basis for Christian civil government set forth by McAllister in chapter 5 of the above named book, continue to be the principles upon which the National Reform Association stands today.

The facts of our political history are not without their philosophical or scientific justification. Back of the historical documentary basis for our national Christianity is the firm foundation of a sound political science. The official documents and acts of our government involve certain fundamental principles concerning the true nature and functions of the nation. Prominent among these principles of Christian political science are such as follows:

1. The moral character and accountability of the nation; in other words, its true moral personality.
2. The justice and necessity of the connection of civil government with religion, without any union with the church; also the impossibility of neutrality on the part of this moral person, the State, in reference to such religious principles as are involved in its nature and functions.
3. The twofold office of a written constitution: (a) To formulate, express, and authenticate the fundamental elements of a nation's providential, vital, or unwritten Constitution; (b) To give authoritative declaration of the will of the people, as sovereign under God, in fundamental principles, for the regulation of the government which they establish.
4. The right of a Christian nation to provide itself with a Christian written Constitution, and with Christian laws and usages founded thereon and authenticated thereby, notwithstanding so-called rights of conscience of objecting individuals.

A chief aim of this essay is to furnish unquestionable authorities on the points above. The weight of authority is here all on one side. From the great mass of testimony that might be cited from the ablest political thinkers of our own and other countries, a comparatively brief selection must be made.

Let us begin with the truth on which the whole controversy hinges. If this truth is conceded, National Reform Association principles are fully justified.

I. The Nation Is a Moral Person

This is an accepted form of statement covering such points as that the nation is not merely an economic, but also a jural society; that it thus has to do with morals, having moral as well as material aims and objects, and that it is capable of being influenced by moral motives. All this simply means that the nation, or the state, in the sense of that word in international law, is a moral agent, or a being with true moral character and accountability. As it is a sovereign power on earth, a power with no earthly superior, its responsibility must be immediately to God Himself. Such a being is properly termed a moral person. Let each eminent witness speak for himself.

Chancellor Kent says that "States, or bodies politic, are to be considered as moral persons, having a public will, capable and free to do right and wrong, inasmuch as they are collections of individuals, each of whom carries with him into the service of the community the same binding law of morality and religion which ought to control his conduct in private life."

Bouvier, in his elaborate work on American law, thus defines a nation: "A nation is an independent body politic; a society of men united together for the purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by their joint efforts and their combined strength. Such a nation becomes a moral person, and is susceptible of obligations and rights." A little further on in the same treatise this high authority says that "nations or states become moral persons, having an understanding and will peculiar to themselves."

Professor Francis Lieber stands among the foremost authorities in political science. No witness on points like these deserves greater respect. He says: "The state, being a jural society, and rights being imaginable between moral beings only, it follows that the state has likewise a moral character, and must maintain it.... Right is founded on the claim each rational or moral being makes on every other rational or moral being."

Dr. Elisha Mulford, one of the great names in political science, author of the book The Nation, a masterpiece of American political writing, teaches this truth with great eloquence and fullness:

The nation is a moral personality. This is the condition of its vocation, as in the fulfillment of its vocation there is the formation of its character.... The nation is a moral person, since it is called as a power in the coming of that kingdom in which there is the moral government of the world, and in whose completion there is the goal of history.... The being of the nation as a moral person has its witness in the consciousness of men. It has awakened the higher moral emotion, and its response has been from the higher moral spirit.... The assertion of the moral being of the nation has been the foundation of that which is enduring in politics, and has been embodied in the political thought and will, which alone have been constructive in the state.... Those who have been the masters of political science, and it has perhaps fewer great names than any other science, all repeat this conception.

John Milton may well take first place among English authorities. Drawing the portraits of "modern politicians," as true to life now as then, he says:

They teach not that to govern well is to train up a nation in true wisdom and virtue, and that which springs from thence, magnanimity (take heed of that), and that which is our beginning, regeneration, and happiest end, likeness to God.... Alas, sir! a commonwealth ought to be as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body; for look what the grounds and causes are of single happiness to one man, the same ye shall find to a whole state....

Edmond Burke is a worthy companion for John Milton. In his celebrated treatise called forth by the French Revolution, he says:

The State ought not to be considered as a partnership agreement, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and dissolved at the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked upon with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection.

Farther on, speaking of the moral relations and duties of the state, he adds, that on account of these the English nations "think themselves bound, not only as individuals in the sanctuary of the heart, or as congregated in that personal capacity, to renew the memory of their high origin and cast; but also in their corporate character to perform their national homage to the Institutor and Author and Protector of civil society."

Dr. Thomas Arnold's name is held in high esteem by all educators of youth, and by all students of history and political science. He says:

It is sometimes urged that...the highest object of the Royal Society as a society is the advancement of science, although to the individuals of that society a moral and religious object would be incomparably of higher value. Why, then, may not the highest object of a nation, as such, be self-defense, or wealth, or any other outward good, although every individual of the nation puts a moral object before any mere external benefits. The answer to this is simply because a nation is a sovereign society, and it is something monstrous that the ultimate power in human life should be destitute of a sense of right and wrong.... That end [the worthy end of a nation's life] appears to be the promoting and securing a nation's highest happiness; so we must express it in its most general formula; but under the most favorable combination of circumstances, this same end is conceived and expressed more purely as the setting forth of God's glory by doing His appointed work.

It is allowed by those who object to the moral theory of a state, that Christian legislators did well in forcibly suppressing gladiatorial shows and impure rites, as being immoral and pernicious actions; but if the legislator has anything to do with morality, the whole question is conceded; for morality is surely not another name for expediency, or what is advantageous for body and goods; yet if it be not, and a legislator may prohibit any practice because it is wicked, then he regards moral ends, and his care is directed towards man's highest happiness, and to putting down his greatest misery, moral evil. Nor, in fact, does it appear how, on other than purely moral considerations, a state is justified in making certain abominations penal.

The Hon. William E. Gladstone in a passage of singular eloquence and beauty, states:

It [the state] is moral, and not merely economical, inasmuch as its laws and institutions, and the acts done under them, are intimately connected with the formation of our moral habits, our modes of thought, and the state of the affections, and inasmuch as its influences pervade the whole scheme and system of our being...that which we are individually, we have come to be in a very considerable degree, through and by means of that which we are nationally.

Phillimore, whose extensive work in three large volumes is one of the highest authorities on International Law, thus defines the nature and law of nations:

Moral persons are governed partly by divine law, which includes natural law; partly by positive instituted human law, which includes written law and unwritten law or custom. States are reciprocally recognized as moral persons. States are therefore governed in their mutual relations partly by divine and partly by positive law. Divine law is either 1st, that which is written by the finger of God in the heart of man, when it is called natural law; or 2nd, that which has been miraculously made known to him, when it is called revealed or Christian law. The primary source, then, of international jurisprudence is Divine Law.

Passing now to French authorities on this fundamental point, I translate from recent carefully edited originals. Vattel affirms that a nation or state "has its own affairs and interests; it deliberates and takes resolutions in common, and thus becomes a moral person, which has its own proper understanding and will, and is capable of obligations and rights."

Martens, another of the most eminent French writers on the law of nations, frequently expresses the same truth. For example: "The state, considered as a moral person, is equally susceptible of a twofold order of rights and obligations: 1st, the internal relation which is established among its members; and 2nd, its external relation towards strangers."

Dr. Verge, the editor of this fine edition of Martens, thus confirms the above statement: "The word 'state' signifies the community of laws or of government, and in this acceptation a state is a veritable moral person."

Serrigny states: "It is agreed to consider a state as constituting a moral or civil person, a collective being, having rights and duties, and in consequence a will of its own, distinct from that of each of its members."

Let German authors follow in this testimony to the moral personality of the state. The name of Bluntschli is one of the most eminent. He states in his Universal Law of States:

While history informs us of the organic nature of the state, it at the same time gives us to understand that the state does not stand in the same rank with the lower vegetable and animal organism, but is of a higher order. History represents the state as a moral-spiritual organism, as a great body that is capable of taking into itself the feelings and thoughts of the people, expressing them as law, and realizing them as deed. It acquaints us with the moral qualities, with the character of single states. It ascribes to the state a personality which has endowed its own will with spirit and body, and made it known....

Schleirmacher is another of Germany's famous ethical writers. In his Christian Morals he says: " We know no opposition between morals and politics. The state, in which we as Christians are to live, must be bound by the same Divine Will that binds us, and have for its nature the same innermost nature which we recognize as our own."

Dorner, a name as celebrated in ethics as in theology, gives this clear testimony: "It [the state] is a free person, a living existence, a moral personality.... Neither is it the sum of all other moral communities; on the contrary, it is itself one of them, which has been entrusted with the administration of right."

Stahl's is a worthy name with which to crown this array of authorities in political science. Perhaps no work in any language has commanded as profound respect in its own department as his Philosophy of Right. In this he repeatedly affirms the moral character and accountability of the state. He says:

The deeper moral ground for the state, even as for the right itself, lies in the divine authority. Human society is a moral kingdom...and governs its common affairs in the manner of a personality, as one will and understanding, as one acting subject. For this purpose it is ordered and ordained as an institution of government, and this institution is the state.... According to its contents and meaning, it [the state] is a moral empire.... It is not the moral calling of individual men, but the moral calling of human society as one whole, on which the state is founded.

It would be an unpardonable error to omit from this list of political philosophers the name of Pufendorf, who filled at Heidelberg, the first university professorship of International Law ever established (1632-1649). In his work, De Jure Naturae et Gentium, he undertook to show that states are bound by moral law, "and that the sum and substance of the law properly governing the society of States is simply the code of morality applied to the peculiar relations in which States find themselves placed with regard to one another." He, therefore, defined the state to be a "moral person" who ought to act just as a good man ought to act.

David Jayne Hill says that after a view of the "non-moral" conception of the state advocated by Machiavelli "it is refreshing, and even comforting to hear the State described as a moral person." Proceeding further on this line of thought he says, "We are not surprised, therefore, to learn that practically all modern jurists are in agreement with Pufendorf in assigning the attribute of personality to the State." Additionally, "The State is a 'moral person' in the sense of possessing rights and obligations, and being subject to moral law but only in so far as these comport with its nature." As a corollary to this fact he maintains that, "Nothing is more certain than that States are subject to the penalties of violated moral law." And, "It is even easier to take note of penalties consequent upon the violation of moral law in the case of nations, than in the case of individual men" (World Organization and the Modern State, pp. 36-42).

The name of John Bassett Moore deserves a prominent place in this discussion. By appointment of the American Congress he prepared a work on International Law in six volumes. On page 14 of the first volume he says, "Pufendorf propounded the idea, which has been so generally adopted of treating the State as a moral person, endowed with a collective will."

There is a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which places the stamp of approval of that august body on this doctrine, and it should be rescued from the obscurity in which it has been enveloped for a number of years. The case in the decision of which this principle was used came before the Supreme Court by appeal from the Courts of Tennessee. The question involved was the obligation of Tennessee to receive in payment of taxes the issues of the State bank of Tennessee, although the State by constitutional amendment had declared that it would not receive in such payment notes issued during the period of the war between the States. The Supreme Court, in its argument maintained the obligation of the State to honor all the issues of its own bank, quoted Vattel as follows with approbation:

Nations or States are bodies politic, societies of men united together for the promotion of their mutual safety and advantage by the joint efforts of their combined strength. Such a society has her affairs and her interests. She deliberates and takes resolutions in common, thus becoming a moral person who possesses an understanding and a will peculiar to herself, and is susceptible of obligations and rights.

II. The Justice and Necessity of the Connection of Religion and the State

Professor Francis Lieber has been quoted by some who would separate our government entirely from Christianity and give us a purely secular state. To support this view they cite the following: "It belongs to American liberty to separate entirely the institution which has for its object the support and diffusion of religion from the political government." But it is evident that Dr. Lieber here speaks of the church; and it is to her union with the state that he objects, as does the National Reform Association. Dr. Lieber adds: "They [the State constitutions] are not hostile to religion, for we see that most of the State governments direct or allow the Bible to be read in the public schools." The teaching of this authority is still further shown to be on the side of religion and the state in the words: "The great mission which this country has to perform with reference to Europe, requires the total divorce of state and church--not religion."

Justice Story, of the United States Supreme Court, is even more full and explicit on this point:

The right and the duty of the interference of government in matters of religion have been maintained by many distinguished authors, as well those who were the warmest advocates of free governments as those who were attached to governments of a more arbitrary character. Indeed, the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well-being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being and attributes and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to Him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues;--these never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how any civilized society can well exist without them. And at all events, it is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity as a divine revelation, to doubt that it is the especial duty of government to foster and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects. This is a point wholly distinct from that of the right of private judgment in matters of religion, and of the freedom of public worship according to the dictates of one's conscience.

There will probably be found few persons in this or any other Christian country who would deliberately contend that it was unreasonable or unjust to foster and encourage the Christian religion generally as a matter of sound policy as well as of revealed truth. In fact, every American colony, from its foundation down to the Revolution, with the exception of Rhode Island, if, indeed, that state be an exception, did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, support and sustain in some form the Christian religion; and almost invariably gave a peculiar sanction to some of its fundamental doctrines. And this has continued to be the case in some of the states down to the present period, without the slightest suspicion that it was against the principles of public law and republican liberty. Indeed, in a republic there would seem to be a peculiar propriety in viewing the Christian religion as the basis on which it must rest for its support and permanence, if it be, what it has ever been deemed by its truest friends to be, the religion of liberty.

Probably at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the amendment to it now under consideration [the first amendment], the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religion, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.

It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent when the public worship of God, and the support of religion constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape. The future experience of Christendom, and chiefly of the American states, must settle this problem as yet new in the history of the world, abundant as it has been in experiments in the theory of government.

The real object of the Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by protecting Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government (Story's Commentaries on the Constitution, Cooley's edition; vol. 2, pp. 603-606).

Both Professor Liber and Justice Story simply affirm what was, in substance, embodied by Benjamin Franklin in his speech in the convention that framed our national Constitution in support of his motion for prayers. As this speech is a classic of our language on the religious duty of a nation, let it be given here in full:

Mr. President: The small progress we have made after four or five weeks' close attendance and continual reasonings with each other--our different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many noes as ayes--is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding. We, indeed, seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist. And we have viewed modern states all around Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our circumstances.

In this situation of this assembly, groping, as it were, in the dark, to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illumine our understanding? In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in that struggle must have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth--that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, that "except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed, in this political building, no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded; and we shall become a reproach and a by-word down to future ages. And, what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.

I, therefore, beg leave to move that, henceforth, prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service (Elliott's Debates, vol. v., pp. 253-254; See also Franklin's Works, vol. v., p. 153).

What a sad record is it that the Madison Papers and Franklin's note to his speech give us! Prayers were not thought necessary, and the motion was lost by adjournment. Had that motion carried, the Constitution framed by the Convention would not have been silent as the grave on our national duty to God and the claims of His Son.

In an address before the New York Historical Society, Daniel Webster said:

If we and our posterity shall be true to the Christian religion; if we and they shall live always in the fear of God, and shall respect His commandments; if we and they shall maintain just moral sentiments and such conscientious convictions of duty as shall control the heart and life, we may have the highest hopes of the future fortunes of our country; and if we maintain those institutions of government and that political union, exceeding all praise as much as it exceeds all former examples of political associations, we may be sure of one thing--that while our country furnishes materials for a thousand masters of the historic art, it will be no topic for a Gibbon, it will have no decline or fall. It will go on prospering and to prosper. But if we or our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us that shall bury our glory in profound obscurity (From the newspaper reports of the day in Johnson's Chaplains, p. 55).

In his oration on the landing at Plymouth, Mr. Webster said: "Government is made for man--man as a religious, moral, and social being."

Professor Taylor Lewis, who ranks with such political thinkers as Plato and Cicero of old, and Stahl and Mulford, thus demonstrates the necessary connection between the state and religion, or the impossibility of state neutrality in this matter, in opposition to the secular theory:

The question, what is the state? may be answered theoretically or practically. The latter mode is preferred, because it brings us more directly in contact with certain other questions intimately connected with it, and which are becoming every day more urgent. Instead, therefore, of attempting to give its abstract idea by any a priori reasoning, let us endeavor to ascertain what it is as a fact--as a real power in the world. Its most practical definition may thus be found in what it actually does, or claims to do, and which nothing can prevent it from doing, whether any theory, true or false, would concede or deny such action as belonging to its essential nature.

In thus defining it, it may be said, in the first place, that the state is a power claiming and exercising supreme jurisdiction over a certain portion of earth. Here it acknowledges no superior unless it be God. It is the sovereign arbiter of life and death. It fixes the civil status; it regulates the social action; it determines, either directly or permissively, wholly or partially, according to its sovereign pleasure, the rights, duties, and relations of all human beings within its territorial sway.

The state assumes to determine the public good for which it exists, and for this end, true or false, claims the highest prerogatives of sovereignty, whether directly exercised or for any reasons held in abeyance. It is all there, either as an active or latent force. The state takes charge of the person and of the personal conduct. It defines crime. It makes its prohibitions and commands the measure of the lawful and the right. Hence, it raises or lowers, makes consistent or inconsistent, the standard of public morals, whether it disclaims any such intention or not. It employs force to an unlimited degree. It punishes by the infliction of pain to any amount it may deem necessary. It banishes, it imprisons, it puts to death.

It is, however, enough for us here simply to present the picture of an omnipotent earthly power--a power of life and death, claiming unlimited and illimitable control over millions of human beings now existing, over generations yet unborn--determining, in fact, how they should be born, or under what conditions, with or without their consent, they should commence their individual earthly existence--above all, an educating power, educating by it laws and its political actions, educating directly and positively by assuming to prescribe what shall be taught and what shall not be taught in the schools--a power that must, to a great extent, determine the social character, and fix the moral standard of an age, or of ages yet to come.

Can such a power be neutral; can it be in a state of indifference in regard to a human interest so vital, so pervasive, so ineradicable, as that of religion? To every serious and intelligent mind the question would seem to answer itself from the very force of the terms in which it is stated. There are, however, arguments drawn from both reason and experience, which put beyond all controversy the proof of such impossibility. Whatever difficulties, therefore, may be in the way of adjustment, we must prepare ourselves for the one side or the other of this dire alternative.

The state must be for or against, religion, for or against Christianity. That which may be called the mind of the disposition of the state, as exhibited in its legislation, its jurisprudence, its general political action, and above all, in its claim to be an educating power, must have an attitude of friendship or hostility. It cannot avoid contact with this vital, all-pervading influence, and that contact must be one of amity or repulsion.

The intimate and necessary connection of religion with the very foundation of a nation's life is thus set forth as a matter of purely philosophical investigation by such writers as Schelling, Hegel, and Max Muller:

It was Schelling, one of the profoundest thinkers of Germany, who first asked the question, what makes an ethnos? What is the true origin of a people.... Is it community of blood? I doubt it. Community of blood produces families, clans, possibly races, but it does not produce that higher and purely moral feeling which binds men together and makes them a people. It is language and religion that makes a people; but religion is even a more powerful agent than language.... The most signal confirmation of this view is to be found in the history of the Jews, the chosen people of God. The language of the Jews differed from that of the Phenicians, the Moabites, and other neighboring tribes, much less than the Greek dialects differed from each other. But the worship of Jehovah made the Jews a peculiar people, the people of Jehovah, separated by their God, though not by their language, from the people of Chemosh (the Moabites), and from the worshippers of Baal and Ashtoreth.... A people, as Schelling says, exists only when it has determined itself with regard to its mythology [religion].... Hegel, the great rival of Schelling arrived at the same conclusion. In his Philosophy of History, he says: "The idea of God constitutes the general foundation of a people. Whatever is the form of a religion, the same is the form of a state and its constitution; it springs from religion, so much so that the Athenian and Roman states were possible only with the peculiar heathendom of those peoples, and that even now a Roman Catholic state has a different genius and different constitution from a Protestant state."

In affirming that the state is based on religion--that it has its roots in it--we virtually assert that the former has proceeded from the latter, and that this derivation is going on now and will always continue; i.e., the principles of the state must be regarded as valid in and for themselves, which can only be in so far as they are recognized as determinate manifestations of the Divine nature. The form of religion, therefore, decides that of the state and its constitution.

Literature furnishes us with few examples of combined philosophy and eloquence, such as Pere Hyacinthe's lecture on "Religion in the Life of Nations." This gifted orator says:

I propose to prove that religion is the principle of national existence and prosperity. I shall do this in two ways: First, by a general view, showing, not so much by reasoning as by history, how nations are constituted by their soul, and that this soul itself is quickened by religion; and then, with a more impressive particularity, tracing the action of religious principle into the midst of the passions of public life, when it wakens and sustains those two forces, the loss of which nothing else can make good--social justice and patriotic faith.... The soul of a people is, above all, its religion.... The school of opinion against which I am contending thinks that it finds in the United States an example and model of the separation of the religious and national life. I do not know a more complete mistake. What is separated in the United States is the state and the church.... I am right, then, in saying, with our Holy Book, that righteousness is the salvation of nations, and that Christianity has for its mission upon earth to establish the kingdom of social as well as individual righteousness.

No better statements can be found with which to close this view of the philosophic basis of national Christianity than the words of Dr. Martensen, in his admirable treatise on Christian ethics:

No state can exist without moral ideas, which, in turn, rest upon religious ideas, whether true or false. We define the Christian state as that whose fundamental moral ideas are determined by Christianity; as that which finds its most determining, therefore its supra-political impulses and ideas in the Christian view of life and of the world.

The inmost and deepest interest of humanity is not culture, but morality and religion. Humanity can neither be delivered from its limitations, nor come to a true knowledge of itself, without Christianity.... Moreover, every notion of humanity which is not the Christian one, is more or less affected with falsehood. Hence the truly humanistic [i.e., humanitarian, promoting the welfare of mankind] state is one, and the same with the Christian state.

The necessity for the Christianization of states rests upon the circumstance that the state is the realm of external justice. But external justice cannot be carried out or administered without internal justice; in other words, without a religious and moral disposition, by which alone it can come to pass that the laws are obeyed not from fear of punishment, but for conscience sake.

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