Is This a Christian Country?: Address (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Is This a Christian Country?: Address

The most childish proofs have been adduced that it is. One of the arguments advanced is that even the President of the United States, when inducted into of fice, takes his official oath on the Bible. In Prussia, until the year 1869, every Jewish witness was required to take an oath more J udaico, that is, in a Jewish way. He was led to the nearest synagogue and there made to swear with his hand on the sacred Hebrew scroll. Prussian law thus recognized the Jewish oath. The same logic, then, which from our American oath infers that this is a Christ ian country would have required Prussia at that time to have been denominated a Jewish country, would have com pelled it to introduce into its schools Pentateuchal read ings in Hebrew and would have made the synagogue its official church. The requirement of an oath on the Bible is not a recognition or honoring of Biblical religion. On the contrary it is a dishonoring of the man or woman from whom the oath is required. It means a distrust of that party's manhood or womanhood in that particular in stance unless the party binds himself by the most solemn form and formula his convictions recognize. Whenever a man, however, rises to such a grandeur of personal con sciousness that his simple word is his highest and mostsolemn attestation of truth or of his integrity of purpose, there is not a court in our land in which, nor any occa sion on which his mere affirmation will not be permitted and recognized. And were any President-elect great. Enough to demand that his simple word shall be the suf ficient guarantee of his conscientious intention honorably to discharge the functions of his office, that very attitude would at once make him the idol of our American millions who are ever enthusiasts over plain, honest manhood, and would at once lift him into a star of the first magnitude in the brilliant galaxy of our Presidential immortals.

Another argument of this nature is that we use of ficially and in common practice the era A. D., Anno Domini, In the year of the Lord. But this is merely a conformity with a world-wide convention, so that our datings, the times and terms of our engagements may be universally and readily understood. However, as you all well-know, every national document of exceptional im portance bears an additional dating, namely from 'the year of the independence of the United States of Amer ica, and if we can be said to possess an officially recog nized era, it is only this.

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