[Extract from an article entitled “The Harvest of Imperialism and Expansion,” by Alonzo T. Jones, in the forthcoming “World’s Harvest” edition of the Signs of the Times, dated November 29.]
TWO APOSTAMSIES
WHO does not know of the powerful and universal efforts that for years have been made, and are constantly being made, in the United States, even by the professed Protestant denominations, to secure here a firm union of church and state, to have the church power dominate the civil, and use it for her own ends? Who does not know of the dangerous progress that has been already made in this direction? Who does not know that all the branches of the national government—the legislated, the judicial, and the executive—have been officially committed to the union of religion and state in this nation? At the great biennial assembly of the Epworth League, held at Indianapolis last July, representative and official speakers with evident satisfaction recognized that there is even now a union of church and state in this nation.
Now, for professed Protestants anywhere to favor a union of church and state, or any recognition of religion by the state, is in itself a confession of apostasy. And for professed Protestants to do such a thing in the United States, where by every principle of its fundamental law the nation is pledged to the complete separation of religion, and particularly the Christian religion, and the state, is even double apostasy.
And what of the Republic itself? Is there not apostasy there also? Can the principles and the plain statements of the Declaration of Independence be repudiated and declared to be “falsehood palmed off by the devil upon a credulous world,” as was publicly done in an imperialistic mass-meeting in Chicago, May 7, 1899,—can this be done without apostasy? Can the fundamental principles and precepts of a nation be disregarded and even repudiated by that nation, and those who steadfastly maintain those principles be denounced as traitors, without there being an apostasy of that nation? How could complete national apostasy be more plainly shown than in a nation’s holding as traitors those who steadfastly maintain the fundamental principles of the nation? Yea, how could national apostasy be more plainly shown than in a nation’s taking such a course that those who maintain the fundamental principles of the nation must, in so doing, “antagonize the Government” and incur the charge of treason?
Here, then, there is in this nation, as there was in the Roman nation, an apostasy in religion and church, and an apostasy from republicanism to imperialism in the state. And there is being steadily formed and fixed a union of these two apostasies, precisely as there was in the Roman nation. That union in the Roman nation made the Papacy; and this union in this American nation will make the image of the Papacy. And so history does repeat itself after every feature of that ancient great republic, and will so repeat itself unto the end.