Notes on Current Topics [pp. 165-168]

NOTES ON CURRENT TOPICS.
free press; now although it has been with scanty national resources, and with faults and imperfections in the administration
of their national affairs, and in their character as a people,-and
may not these two last predicates be affirmed even of ourselves
and the English people, who have enjoyed so much higher privileges? —yet the Greeks of our day have been steadily advancing in all that constitutes the material well-being of a country;
while in maritime and commercial enterprise, and in education,
they have achieved a progress unsurpassed, if indeed equaled,
in any other instances of human history.
Those who are bent on giving our Hellenic contemporaries
the low place generally assigned them, can still do so in the face
of such vindicatory facts. But the candid opinion of the world,
when properly enlightened, as to the forty years past, and as
to the present, of that once renowned people, will paraphrase
Byron's famous line, and express what is but true and just, in
saying:
Greece is living Greece once more!
ART. IX.-NOTES ON CURRENT TOPICS.
Is CHRISTIANITY THE LAW OF THE LAND?
This question arose in some of the discussions before the late Evangelical Alliance. It has frequently been argued by our great jurists and
statesmen, and passed upon by the courts. Nor has the current of opinion been uniform. Mr. Webster eloquently contended for the affirmative
in his great argument in the Girard will case. Dr. Woolsey not obscurely
intimated a contrary opinion in his paper before the Evangelical Alliance. We think, like a great many other questions, it is not adequately
answered by a simple yes or no. In some respects Christianity is, in
others it is not, the law of the land.
Christianity is certainly not the law of the land, in that this law requires belief in its doctrines, or obedience to its requirements as a
whole, or to any of them, as such. Nor is it in the sense of sustaining,
or requiring adhesion to, any church organization, or in any manner in 11
1874.]
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