Editorials | May 11, 2016
"Rome, the mistress of state-craft, and beyond all other nations in the politic employment of religion, added without stint or scruple to her list of gods and goddesses, and consolidated her military by a skilful medley of all the religions of the world. Thus it continued while the worship of Deity was but a conjecture or a contrivance; but when the rising of the Sun of Righteousness had reality to the subjective forms of faith, had actual and solid truth the common inheritance of men then the religion of Christ became, unlike new creeds an object of jealousy and of cruel persecution because it would not consent to become partner in this heterogeneous device and planted upon truth and not in the quicksand of opinion...
...should the Christian faith ever become but one among many co-equal pensioners of a government, it will be a proof that subjective religion has again lost its God given hold upon objective reality; or when under the thin shelter of its name, a multitude of discordant schemes shall have been placed upon a footing of essential parity, and shall together receive the bounty of the legislature, this will prove that we are once more in a transition-state - that we are travelling back again from the region to which the Gospel brought us towards that in which it found us." - The state in its relations with the church, Volume 1 - William Ewart Gladstone, 1841
Lesslie Newbigin quotes W.E. Gladstone in Foolishness to the greeks. He then goes on to say: "What Gladstone foretold is essentially what has been happening during the 140 years since he wrote those words. The result is not, as we once imagined, a secular society, it is a pagan society; and its paganism, having been born out of the rejection of Christianity, is far more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian paganism with which cross cultural missions have been familiar. Here, surely, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time."