“IS it not perfectly manifest,” says the Christian Statesman, of February 22, “after all our comparatively fruitless efforts to cure our festering political corruption by other means, that the only adequate remedy is to bring our nation into acknowledged subjection to the perfect and purifying law of Christ?” This it says in behalf of the so-called Christian Amendment which it is trying to have fastened upon the national Constitution.
The “purifying law of Christ” does not [91] consist in the written words of an acknowledgment, but is “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” which makes the believer free from the “law of sin and death.” 592 It is the very life of Christ, which he lives in the believer’s heart. 593 It is therefore altogether above and beyond the reach of the United States Constitution. Only a very low and altogether earthly view of the purifying law of Christ could ever have conceived it as being applicable to the nation through the Constitution.
It is an easy thing to make an acknowledgment or profession of Christianity; but mere profession accomplishes nothing. So long as the hearts of legislators and of the people are filled with the natural depravity of human nature, so long will “our festering political corruption” remain uncured, whatever profession may be inserted into the Constitution.