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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 65

Religion and Politics

Religion and Politics.

Before proceeding with the few remarks which I intend to make, I wish to preface them with this reflection. When I resolved to place myself in this position—and which I have done with much diffidence and hesitation—I turned up the article 'Politics' in a popular Encyclopædia. The article seemed written with some ability. Its writer spoke of politics when taken in the widest sense of the word. He then divided and treated the subject under such heads as Natural Law, Abstract and Theoretical Politics, Political Economy, the Science of Politics, the History of Politics, and so forth. He showed that the soul of Political Science was order and law. But he forgot to mention that under these laws there was another law, or spirit of law, the Revealed and Divine, which gave to them all their certainty and sanction; and that all the body of human politics and law, without this spirit, is dead or destructive. This is sometimes, too, forgotten by others as well as the writer of that article. The application of the Great Scripture to the scriptures of Politics might be, I think, more extensively given, and page 130 revealed religion be more remembered as in this respect the whole duty of man. Man is not his own master, and he knows it. His reason, his natural religion, his natural laws, are like a good many other things—natural to the world and to man. They are but ruins and the father of ruins. And these ruins and their history declare that if the will of man's Master be not ever recognised and followed" wrath and death will reign through all his walls, and till not a stone of them be left upon another.