Joseph A. Seiss - Luther and the Reformation:
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Joseph A. Seiss >> Luther and the Reformation:
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CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS.
This was in exact accord with the principles and provisions under
which the original colony had been formed, and had already been living
and prospering for more than forty years preceding. Everything,
therefore, was in full readiness and condition for the universal and
hearty adoption of the grand first article enacted by the first
General Assembly, to wit: "That no person now or hereafter residing in
this province, who shall confess one Almighty God to be the Creator,
Upholder, and Ruler of the world, and profess himself obliged in
conscience to live peaceably and justly under the civil government,
shall in any wise be molested or prejudiced on account of his
conscientious persuasion or practice; nor shall he be compelled to
frequent or maintain any religious worship, place, or ministry
contrary to his mind, but shall freely enjoy his liberty in that
respect, without interruption or reflection."
In these specific provisions all classes in the colony at the time
heartily united. And thus was secured and guaranteed to every good
citizen that full, rightful, and precious religious freedom which is
the birthright of all Americans, for which the oppressed of all the
ages sighed, and which had to make its way through a Red Sea of human
tears and blood and many a sorrowful wilderness before reaching its
place of rest.
SAFEGUARDS TO TRUE LIBERTY.
IV. But the religious liberty which our fathers thus sought to secure
and to transmit to their posterity was not a licentious libertinism.
They knew the value of religious principles and good morals to the
individual and to the state, and they did not leave it an open
matter, under plea of free conscience, for men to conduct themselves
as they please with regard to virtue and religion.
To be disrespectful toward divine worship, to interfere with its free
exercise as honest men are moved to render it, or to set at naught the
moral code of honorable behavior in human society, is never the
dictate of honest conviction of duty, and, in the nature of things,
cannot be. It is not conscience, but the overriding of conscience;
nay, rebellion against the whole code of conscience, against the
foundations of all government, against the very existence of civil
society. Liberty to blaspheme Almighty God, to profane his name and
ordinances, to destroy his worship, and to set common morality at
naught, is not religious liberty, but disorderly wickedness, a cloak
of maliciousness, the licensing of the devil as an angel of light. It
belongs to mere brute liberty, which must be restrained and brought
under bonds in order to render true liberty possible. Wild and lawless
freedom must come under the restraints and limits of defined order,
peace, and essential morality, or somebody's freedom must suffer, and
social happiness is out of the question. And it is one of the inherent
aims and offices of government to enforce this very constraint,
without which it totally fails of its end and forfeits its right to
be. Where people are otherwise law-abiding, orderly, submissive to the
requisites for the being and well-being of a state, and abstain from
encroachments upon the liberties of others, they are not to be
molested, forced, or compelled in spiritual matters contrary to their
honest convictions; but public blasphemy, open profanity, disorderly
interference with divine worship and reverence, and the hindrance of
what tends to the preservation of good morals, it pertains to the
existence and office of a state to restrain and punish. Severity upon
such disorders is not tyrannical abridgment of the rights of
conscience, for no proper citizen's conscience can ever prompt or
constrain him to any such things. And everything which tends to weaken
and destroy regard for the eternal Power on which all things depend,
to relax the sense of accountability to the divine judgment, and to
trample on the laws of eternal morality, is the worst enemy of the
state, which it cannot allow without peril to its own existence.
On the other hand, the state is bound for the same reasons to protect
and defend religion in general and the cultivation of the religious
sentiments, in so far, at least, as the laws of virtue and order are
not transgressed in the name of religion. It may not interfere to
decide between different religious societies or churches, as they may
be equally conscientious and honest in their diversities; but where
the tendency is to good and reverence, and the training of the
community to right and orderly life, it belongs to the office and
being of the state not only to tolerate, but to protect them all
alike. In the fatherly care of its subjects, the people consenting,
the state may also recommend and provide support for some particular
and approved order of faith and worship, just as it provides for
public education. And though the civil power may not rightfully
punish, fine, imprison, and oppress orderly and honest citizens for
conscientious non-conformity to any one specific system of belief and
worship, it may, and must, provide for and protect what tends to its
rightful conservation, and also condemn, punish, and restrain
whatsoever tends to unseat it and undermine its existence and peace.
These are fundamental requirements in all sound political economy.
LAWS ON RELIGION AND MORALS.
Our fathers, in their wisdom, understood this, and fashioned their
state provisions and laws accordingly.
The thing specified as the supreme concern of the public authorities
in the original settlement of this territory by the Swedes was, to
"consider and see to it that a true and due worship, becoming honor,
laud, and praise be paid to the most high God in all things," and that
"all persons, but especially the young, shall be duly instructed in
the articles of their Christian faith."
But if public worship and religious instruction are to be fostered and
preserved by the state, there must be set times for it, the people
released at those times from hindering occupations and engagements,
and whatever may interfere therewith restrained and put under bonds
against interruption. In other words, the Lord's proper worship
demands and requires a protected Lord's Day. Such appointed and sacred
times for these holy purposes have been from the foundation of the
world. Under all dispensations one day in every seven was a day unto
the Lord, protected and preserved for such sacred uses, on which
secular occupations should cease, and nothing allowed which would
interfere with the public worship of Almighty God and the handling of
his Word. And "because it was requisite to appoint a certain day, that
the people might know when they ought to come together, it appears
that the Christian Church [and so all Christian states] did for that
purpose appoint the Lord's Day," our weekly Sunday.
This William Penn found in existence and observance by the Swedes and
the Dutch on this territory when he arrived. He therefore advised, and
the first General Assembly of Pennsylvania justly ordained, "that,
according to the good example of the primitive Christians and the ease
of the creation, every first day of the week, called the Lord's Day,
people shall abstain from their common daily labor, that they may the
better dispose themselves to worship God according to their
understandings"--a provision so necessary and important that the
statute laws of our commonwealth have always guarded its observance
with penalties which the State cannot in justice to itself allow to go
unenforced, and which no good citizen should refuse strictly to obey.
And to the same end was it provided and ordained by the first General
Assembly that "if any person shall abuse or deride another for his
different persuasion or practice in religion, such shall be looked
upon as disturbers of the peace, and be punished accordingly." And in
the line of the same wholesome and necessary policy it was also
further provided and ordained that "all such offences against God as
swearing, cursing, lying, profane talking, drunkenness, obscene words,
revels, etc. etc., which excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, and
irreligion, shall be respectively discouraged and severely punished."
Such were the good and righteous provisions made for the restraint of
the licentiousness and brutishness of man in the primeval days of our
commonwealth; and wherein it has since sunk away from these original
organic laws the people have only weakened and degraded themselves,
and hindered that virtuous and happy prosperity which would otherwise
in far larger degree than now be our inheritance.
FORMS OF GOVERNMENT.
V. And yet again, as the fathers of our commonwealth gave us religion
without compulsion, so they also gave us a State without a king.
There is nothing necessarily wrong or necessarily right in this
particular. Monarchy, aristocracy, republicanism, or pure democracy
cannot claim divine right the one over against the other. Either may
be good, or either may be bad, as the situation and the chances may
be. There has been as much bloody wrong and ruin wrought in the name
of liberty as in the establishment of thrones. There have been as good
and happy governments by kings as by any other methods of human
administration. Civil authority is essential to man, and the power for
it must lie somewhere. The only question is as to the safest
depository of it. The mere form of the government is no great matter.
It has been justly said, "There is hardly a government in the world so
ill designed that in good hands would not do well enough, nor any so
good that in ill hands can do aught great and good." Governments
depend on men, not men on governments. Let men be good, and the
government will not be bad; but if men are bad, no government will
hold for good. If government be bad, good men will cure it; and if the
government be good, bad men will warp and spoil it. Nor is there any
form of government known to man that is not liable to abuse,
prostitution, tyranny, unrighteousness, and oppression.
The best government is that which most efficiently conserves the true
ends of government, be the form what it may. Anything differing from
this is worthless sentimentalism, undeserving of sober regard. And to
meet the true ends of government there must be power to enforce
obedience, and there must be checks upon that power to secure its
subjects against its abuse; for "liberty without obedience is
confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery." But there may be
liberty under monarchy, as well as reverence and obedience under
democracy, whilst there may be oppression and bloody tyranny under
either.
Amid the varied experiments of the ages the human mind is more and
more settling itself in favor of mixed forms of government, in which
the rights of the people and the limitations of authority are set down
in fixed constitutions, taking the direct rule from the multitude, but
still holding the rulers accountable to the people. Such were more or
less the forms under which the founders of our commonwealth were
tutored.
A REPUBLICAN STATE.
But they went a degree further than the precedents before them. They
believed the safest depository of power to be with the people
themselves, under constitutions ordained by those intending to live
under them and administered by persons of their own choice. "Where
the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws," was believed
to be the true ideal and realization of civil liberty--the way "to
support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people
from the abuse of power, that they may be free by their just
obedience, and the magistrates honorable for their just
administration."
And with these ideas, "with reverence to God and good conscience to
men," the first General Assembly in 1682 enacted a common code of
sixty-one laws, in which the foundation-stones of the civil and
criminal jurisprudence of this broad commonwealth were laid, and a
style of government ordained so reasonable, moderate, just, and equal
in its provisions that no one yet has found just cause to deny the
wisdom and beneficence of its structure, whilst Montesquieu pronounces
it "an instance unparalleled in the world's history of the foundation
of a great state laid in peace, justice, and equality."
THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
Two hundred years have gone by since this completed organization of
our noble commonwealth. Her free and liberal principles then still
remained in large measure to be learned by some of the other American
colonies. From the very start she was the chief conservator of what
was to be the model for all this grand Union of free States--a
character which she has never lost in all the history of our national
existence. Six generations of stalwart freemen has she reared beneath
her shielding care to people her own vast territory and that of many
other States, no one of which has ever failed in truthfulness to the
great principles in which she was born. Always more solid than noisy,
and more reserved than obtrusive, she has ever served as the great
balance-wheel in the mighty engine of our national organization. Her
life, commingled with other lives attempered to her own, now pulsates
from ocean to ocean and from the frozen lakes to the warm Gulf waters,
all glad and glorious in the unity and sunshine of constitutional
government in the hands of a free people. With her population drawn
from all nationalities to learn from her lips the sacred lessons of
independent self-rule, she has sent it forth as freely to the westward
to build co-equal States in the beauty of her own image, whilst four
millions of her children still abide in growing happiness under her
maternal care. Verily, it was the spirit of prophecy which said, two
hundred years ago, "_God will bless that ground_."
That blessing we have lived to see. May it continue for yet many
centennials, and grow as it endures! May the faith and spirit of the
men through whose piety and wisdom it has come still warm and animate
the hearts of their successors to the latest generations! May no
careless or corrupt administration of justice or "looseness" or
infidelities of the people come in to bring down the wrath of Heaven
for its interruption! May the sterling principles of our happy freedom
be made good to us and our posterity by the good keeping of them in
honest virtue and obedience, and in due reverence of Him who gave
them, and who is the God and Judge of nations! May those sacred
conditions of the divine favor "which descend not with worldly
inheritances" be so embedded in the training and education of our
youth that the spirit of the children may not be a libel on the faith
and devotion of their fathers!
Centuries have passed, but the God of Gustavus Adolphus, of the
Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, of William Penn, and of the hero-saints of
every age and country still lives and reigns. Men may deny it, but
that does not alter it. His government and Gospel are the same now
that they have ever been. What he most approved and blessed in their
days he most approves and blesses in ours. And may their fear and love
of him be to us and our children a copy and a guide, to steer in
safety amid the dangerous rapids of these doubtful times!
"And thou, Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of this province, named
before thou wert born! what love, what care, what service, and what
travail has there been to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such
as would abuse and defile thee! My soul prays to God for thee, that
thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that thy children may be
blessed of the Lord, and thy people saved by his power."
THE END.
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