SUPERSTITION UNVEILED.


Religion has an important bearing on all the relations and conditions of
life. The connexion between religious faith and political practice is,
in truth, far closer than is generally thought. Public opinion has not
yet ripened into a knowledge that religious error is the intangible but
real substratum of all political injustice. Though the 'Schoolmaster'
has done much, there still remain among us, many honest and energetic
assertors of 'the rights of man,' who have to learn that a people in the
fetters of superstition cannot, secure political freedom. These
reformers admit the vast influence of Mohammedanism on the politics of
Constantinople, and yet persist in acting as if Christianity had little
or nothing to do with the politics of England.

At a recent meeting of the Anti-State Church Association it was remarked
that _throw what we would into the political cauldron, out it came in an
ecclesiastical shape_. If the newspaper report may be relied on, there
was much laughing among the hearers of those words, the deep meaning of
which, it may safely be affirmed, only a select few of them could
fathom.

Hostility to state churches by no means implies a knowledge of the close
and important connection between ecclesiastical and political questions.
Men may appreciate the justice of voluntaryism in religion, and yet have
rather cloudy conceptions with respect to the influence of opinions and
things ecclesiastical on the condition of nations. They may clearly see
that he who needs the priest, should disdain to saddle others with the
cost of him, while blind to the fact that no people having faith in the
supernatural ever failed to mix up such faith with political affairs.