September 1, 1898
CHRISTIANITY is the only true optimism.
CHRISTIANITY means the power of love; politics means the love of power.
THE Golden Rule cannot be run into the mold of legislation.
THE earth is run by politics, but Christianity is the motive power of heaven.
POLITICS is a struggle for the mastery; Christianity seeks not to rule, but to serve.
PEOPLE who claim to be saints and to own the earth may well be viewed with suspicion.
THE theory that the civil ruler is bound to execute the will of God, can become effective only by making the church the power behind the throne.
GOD never patches up a piece of his handiwork that has become marred by sin; he does it over, regenerates it, makes a new creation.
THE use of force by Christ’s servants is an argument that his kingdom is of this world. But as the argument itself is false, so those who advance it are false servants.
JESUS CHRIST never held or will hold a political office.
THE purest politics can draw no soul heavenward.
POLITICS has its source in human nature; Christianity flows from the divine nature.
IT would be just as easy to preserve Christianity by law as to preserve the Sabbath by law.
WHEN men try to set up the kingdom of God, they always reserve positions of honor in it for themselves.
IF the pathway of politics tended upward, the pathways of nations would not tend, as all have done, toward decay.
[Inset.] THE “GATEWAY OF POLITICS.” IN this day very much is expected from politics by would-be reformers of society. Indeed, from one of the leading reform movements of the age the statement has come that “the kingdom of God is to enter the realm of law through the gateway of politics;” and this states the principle upon which reform work in general is now being conducted. Through politics, men expect to usher in the millennium. But can the kingdom of God pass through such a gateway as this? Will that kingdom pass by the evil and corruption which find in politics their readiest field of action, and are as inseparable from it as they are from human nature? Assuredly not. Rather will it sweep away all these things, leaving neither politics nor political governments. A reform which is in harmony with that kingdom must be separate from politics.