Ezra Gannett - The Religion of Politics

Neither is it an attention to forms, however sincere, nor a use of institutions, however constant, that will satisfy the demands of Christianity. It requires something more than reverence for the means by which it binds its power upon the disciple. The age in which faith terminates in the means of religion is the precursor of an age of unbelief. Ceremonies are but the ghosts of dead professions, unless a living faith convert them into ministers of goodness. Forms are needed, institutions are all but essential; but they are only the garments in which the Divine spirit of religion must be clad for its exposure to a cold and ungenial world. Many are there who look with profound respect upon the dress, but think not whether it covers a divinity or a fiction. How have men – great statesmen and small politicians as well as others – praised the Established Church of England, and actually stood in awe of its majesty, when the thought of its spiritual relation to themselves or any one else had perhaps never crossed their minds.

It is not reverence at certain times – a periodical service – by which men are required to prove themselves disciples of Christ. Righteousness, holiness, is not confined to any hour or place. The sanctuary whose walls the hands of labour have raised, is not the only house of God. There is a temple which the Divine Architect has reared, whose walls are immortal, in which his worship must be maintained by faculties ever conscious of his presence. There is an altar, the altar of the heart, on which a perpetual sacrifice must be presented.

That sacrifice too must be a whole burnt-offering. The man must give himself to God, “a living sacrifice,” in body and in soul, which is but his “reasonable service.” I pause not from my original purpose, to show how reasonable; but I insist upon the truth that a partial obedience, in whatever sense it be partial, will not meet the requisitions of Christianity. It is neither a part of human nature, nor a part of human life, which must be devoted to religion; but the whole – the whole of life, the whole of man. The man must be thoroughly, habitually, entirely religious. His loftiest purposes and grandest conceptions, his most familiar exercises and meanest employments, his whole impulse, energy and activity must be sanctified by faith – faith in God and his will, in Christ and his revelations. “Whether he eat or drink, or whatever he do, he must do all to the glory of God.” Whatever he do. Mark the words. They leave room for no exception. Whatever be the nature of one’s engagements, public or private; wherever he be, in the house or the street; whenever his course be examined, on Sunday or week-day, morning, noon, or night; he must be found living to God’s glory, – through faith, I repeat, and through the obedience which is the consequence of faith. Character is the service which he must render.

A character of which the principle is indicated by the words of the Apostle, will obtain a twofold development, as it shall seek the direction on the one hand of piety, and on the other of morality. Each of these forms of growth will proceed from an idea as its germ; the one from the idea of God, the other from the idea of man. The idea of God, – the Supreme, Eternal, Infinite Being, whose will nothing can overrule, but whose unimpeachable perfection is a guarantee for the rectitude of his government.

“He is Governor among the nations; but justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne.” “Thine, O Lord, are the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, and thou art exalted as Head above all. Both riches and honour come of thee, and thou reignest over all: and in thine hand is power and might, and in thine hand it is to make great and to give strength unto all.” Worthily, so far as language could go, did the greatest of Israel’s monarchs, and one of the first of human bards, in these words celebrate the majesty of Him who is Higher than the highest, the Maker, Guardian, and Sovereign of the universe. Religion adopts this description as the groundwork of its sentiments and exercises. With God it begins, to Him it returns, in Him it rests. To Him it traces all blessing, from Him receives direction concerning the aim and course of life, and as its first and last and central principle aspires to “do all things to his glory.” Led to Him as the Creator by his works, which it contemplates, reminded of Him as the Almighty Ruler by his providence, the aspects of which it reverently studies, and taught to call Him the Father by Christ, to whose instructions it yields a joyful obedience, it revolves around the Supreme Being as its light and security, through its relation to whom it is safe amidst the world’s commotions and blessed in life’s decay.

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