Reformed Presbyterian Minutes of Synod 1928 - Rparchives.org

REFORMED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 67
avenged? By the giving over of our whole national life to
secularism. Our courts and schools are largely secular, and
even such holy ordinances as the Sabbath and Marriage are
becoming more and more secular.
Can we doubt that the secularism of our National Constitution
has had its part in effecting the ideals now dominant
concerning the observance of Thanksgiving and Fast Days? In
this we have a demonstration of the real evolution of evil. The
absence here of all Christian acknowledgments is the ground
upon which opposition is being made to the appointment of any
such things. Probably this argument will never prevail for the
abandonment of Thanksgiving, for as a legal holiday and
harvest-home festival it will always be popular with the world;
but what does the form amount to when the spirit is dead ? As
before said, these are both religious ordinances, intended to express
some of the very deepest spiritual sentiments of which
we are capable. The stark secularism of the Constitution is
like a killing frost that blasts the most delicate flowers first;
and in the havoc it has wrought with these institutions, is given
an example of what it will do still farther if the full winter of
unbelief should come.
Against the adoption of such a Constitution, we as a
Church have sworn our dissent. Of this the natural corollary
is non-conformity with all aspects of national secularism—including
those which afflict our Thanksgiving and Fast Days.
Consistency demands as much, but there is still a deeper reason.
Here alone is the true antidote for these conditions. As this
rejection of Christ has been our Political Fall, and this defect
in our Fundamental Law our Original Sin as a Nation; as the
adoption of our secular Constitution was the great act of disobedience
whereby we lost the hope of a political Paradise,
making ourselves exiles from God and subjects of Satan; we
now suffer a form of demon-possession, disbelieved in by the
world, but from which nothing short of prayer and fasting will
ever save us.
It is the repeated verdict of history that whenever God
works any great reformation, He does it first by His Holy
Spirit in the Hearts of His own people, and then by public
judgments upon the rest of mankind. So, while the wicked are
preparing the scourges wherewith they must some day be
whipped into line with God's purposes, His own redeemed children
have another calling. The political conversion of America
awaits the leadership of those who have learned the power of
detachment from worldliness, and are willing to begin our return
from exile with all that is signified by fasting. The Bridegroom
is being kept from returning to us with the blessings
promised to obedient nations for reasons over which the Children
of the Bridechamber should mourn. As a Church we have
shewing true little or God any sorrow ground other our true for observance gratitude to of all expect our He great is for of success not both all objectives receiving we for Thanksgiving are the receiving from until Christian us. we and from are Amendment
Fast right Him, Days, with and