p. 282 | Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · September 15, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 36

Are Sunday Laws a Civil Necessity.

“To substitute a weekly holiday for the Sabbath,” says the Examiner, of this city, “would be the most cruel wrong that could be done to the man who earns his daily bread by daily labor. The Sabbath is a necessity to him, and whoever attacks it directly, or indirectly undermines it, is the laboring man’s enemy, however he disguises himself.”

“To substitute a holiday for the Sabbath,” would be an impossibility with any man who really keeps a Sabbath; for he would accept no such substitution. But if the individual desires a holiday instead of a Sabbath nothing can prevent him from having it. This our contemporary admits when it says:—

There is a constant tendency towards the increase of unnecessary labor. This is due to the growing custom of making Sunday a holiday—a day for junketing and visiting and merry-making. So far as this concerns the merry-makers alone, the State has no cause to interfere; it is a moral question for each person to settle with his own conscience and with God. But when the Sunday holiday begins to nullify the Sunday rest day, the State may and should interfere. Its interference should be solely to protect all classes of citizens in their right to a day of rest.

The only question, especially in cities, is, whether Sunday, for that is the day that all the agitation is about, shall be a day of devotion and of refreshing rest, or of comparatively innocent pleasure and physical recreation, or one of vicious idleness. If, as our contemporary intimates ought to be the case, excursions to the country, and all other avenues of pleasure requiring the employment of labor should be closed, the day would be, for the most part, one of vicious idleness with all but the comparatively small minority who regard and keep it as a Sabbath. For if people who are confined to the office, the shop, or the factory, six days are compelled to remain in the city on Sunday, and are not inclined to go to church, they will resort to the saloons or to worse places; and if these are closed, as they never all are, people will resort to dissipation in their own homes; for idleness, unless sanctified by the influences of religion, inevitably breeds vice. Continuing, the Examiner says:—

Consider what would be the lot of vast classes of working people with fifty-two holidays a year and never a day of rest. That one part of the people may play another must work. To cater to the demands of the merry-makers, thousands must find Sunday the most laborious day of the seven, instead of the most restful. This is true already of employees of horse-car and railway and steamboat companies, of hotel and restaurant keepers, of policemen. How long will it be before Sunday labor becomes general if present legal restraints are ignored or repealed?

As a matter of fact there are comparatively few people who do not, or at least who may not, have regular days of rest if they so desire. Railroad and other employees who work on Sunday, are, with few exceptions, given some other day in the week for rest. And it is a rare thing to find a laboring man broken in health from having insufficient time for rest. Improper living, dissipation, unsanitary surroundings, etc., destroy thousands; and yet on the whole while “holidayism” has been supplanting in a measure, at least, the better form of Sunday observance in this country, the average of human life has increased instead of decreased as one would be led to expect that it would have been by the theories of those who assume that stated weekly rest is a physical necessity.