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I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually, I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period.

But separation of church and state was never meant to separate God and government.

There is no one true church.

Neither the wording of the amendment itself nor common practice challenged the widely held belief that government guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.

Reformation ends not in contemplation, but in action.

Churches should not be directly involved in politics.

The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased.

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.