The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, February, 1880Various
Religion
The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, February, 1880
Various
Religion and science -- Periodicals
the right of the State to the service of its citizens when the public good
requires it.
The word _civil_ also signifies courteous, complaisant, gentle and
obliging, well-bred, affable, kind. From this it will be seen that civil
government depends upon the intelligence and righteousness of the people.
The absence of all legal demands and all legal restraints would be the
absence of all government. It would be libertinism or lawlessness. The
great majority of men, from the earliest ages of the world to the present
time, have been under the control of tyrants, and have known little
exemption from despotic rule. There is not a single Pagan, Mahomedan, or
anti-Christian country to-day in which the spirit of liberty has an
abiding place. She may have brooded over them at intervals, but, like
Noah’s bird, found no resting place.
The influence of the Bible preventing the young, the mature, and the aged
from crime, causing men and women to love and respect our humanity, is of
necessity _to the same extent_ the very life of civil government, and
consequently the life of civil liberty. It has been said the Bible is the
great protector and guardian of the liberties of men. It was an axiom in
an apostate church, that ignorance is the mother of devotion; but the true
origin of this axiom is that ignorance which fastens the chains of civil
and ecclesiastic despotism.
It is not possible for a people thoroughly under the influence of the
teachings of the religion of Christ to be ignorant of their own rights and
the responsibility of their rulers. Where the teachings of Christ and the
Bible form public opinion the people must be free. No such tyrant as
Caligula or Nero would be tolerated in Protestant Christendom. The
necessary effect of Christianity upon an abused people is to make them
restless under a tyrant’s yoke. The author of Travels in England, France,
Spain and the Barbary States, although an enemy to the Bible, said, after
leaving the Barbary States and arriving in France, I could breathe more
freely. I no longer looked upon my fellow men with distrust, and I thanked
God that I was once more in a Christian land. When we survey the history
of past events and kingdoms we, too, find good reasons to thank the Lord
for a Christian land. The only authoritative history of remote events and
kingdoms is in the writings of Moses and the Prophets. In the times of
Moses there were no historical records in Greece, Chaldea, Phoenicia,
Egypt or Assyria. No other historian lived so remote as Moses. He was five
hundred years before Sanconiathan, and more than a thousand years before
Manetho. He has been called the _father of history_. Men have claimed that
astronomical calculations carry us farther back, but this claim has been
successfully refuted by the calculations of Bedford. There is a fact upon
record in Gillie’s history of Greece that confirms Bedford’s calculations.
This man says: After Alexander conquered Babylon he eagerly demanded the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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