Earlier text: THE NECESSITY OF OBEDIENCE AND FAITHTHE first thing in writing is to have something to say. Now everybody can talk, or nearly everybody; and it is pleasant to sit and chat with a friend about the weather, and the fashions, and what Mrs. Milligan had for dinner; but if all this talk was printed in a book, you wouldn't care to read it. So there is a difference between speaking and writing. If you expect people to read what you write, it must be something more interesting than common talk. I don't say the words must be longer and more high-sounding, I don't say anything yet about the words; I haven't got to that. I only say that the subject must be more interesting than ordinary gossip. Or, if you are going to write about common things, you must be able to tell more about them than most people know. You can write about the weather if you have watched it carefully for ten years, and lived outdoors most of the time where you could notice a great many things that other people never see about the clouds, and the stars, and the winds. But if you haven't had this experience, don't try to write about that subject. Never try to write at a subject you don't know anything about; and never try to write at what everybody knows all about already. Write something new. Ah! that's the hard part of it, to find something new to write about—something that you know all about, and nobody else knows anything about. You must keep your eyes open, and perhaps you will see some things that no one else ever noticed; or perhaps you will think some new thoughts about things that others have seen; or perhaps you will think the same things that others have thought, only they have never expressed their thoughts. In any of these cases you may have something to say that is worth saying. But don't imagine that people will read what you write if you go to saying the same old things over again, in the same old way that they have read and read until they are tired of them. I'll tell you one thing not to do. When you read a story or a poem that you think is bright or beautiful, don't say to yourself: "Oh! I'll go and write something just like that." Don't try to write anything just like somebody else. If you have any ideas of your own, write them; and then you must make a practice of reading a good deal in the best books, from which you will see whether they have said the same things you have, just as a man who has some fruit to sell will look around in the market to see if the market isn't already full of the fruit.—Treasure Trove. THE whole tendency of the times is to make us act by the standard of what others do. If they play cards, we play cards. If they dance, we dance. If they read certain styles of books, we read them. We throw over the walls of our character the tangled plumb-line of our lives and reject the infallible test which Amos saw. Amos 7: 8. The question for me should not be what you think is right, but what God thinks is right. This perpetual reference to the behavior of others, as though it decided anything but human fallibility, is a mistake as wide as the world. There are 10,000 plumb-lines in use, but only one is true and exact, and that is the line of God's eternal right. There is a mighty attempt being made to reconstruct and fix up the ten commandments. To many they seem too rigid. The tower of Pisa leans over about thirteen feet from the perpendicular; . . . why not have the ten granite blocks of Sinai set a little aslant? Why not have the pillars of truth a leaning tower? My friends, we must have a standard; shall it be God's or man's? —T. De Witt Talmage's Sunday Sermon. That's it exactly; why not put first-day in the fourth granite block of Sinai instead of seventh? Most people do, even Dr. Talmage. The perpendicular is, "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God, in it thou shalt not do any work." How does it read when, "according to the tendency of the times," it is "set a little aslant"? WHICH WAS SANCTIFIED, THE SABBATH INSTITUTION OR SEVENTH DAY?
By Elmer E. Franke
ONE of the most common first-day-of-the-week arguments is that God had anticipated a change of the Sabbath and therefore sanctified the institution and not the day. They then attempt to prove it by quoting the fourth commandment. But as most of those who use this argument get it from the writings of Dr. Timothy Dwight, we will quote from his Theology, Vol. 4, Sermon CVI. After quoting the Sabbath commandment he proceeds as follows:— "It cannot escape the notice of every reader of this passage [the fourth commandment] that the duty of remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy enjoined at the beginning, and the blessing and consecration mentioned at the end, are applied to the Sabbath and not to the day. . . . The blessing also and the sanctification were annexed to the Sabbath day and not to the seventh." If such language as this should come from a man who was unlearned and did not have the benefit of a classical education, it might be thought excusable, but coming as it does from the late president of Yale College, it deserves severe criticism. I have before me a literal word-for-word translation of the Sabbath commandment of the decalogue, which I quote in full:— "Remember the day of the Sabbath to keep it holy. Six days thou shalt work, and perform all thy labor; but the seventh day is Sabbath to Jehovah thy God. Thou shalt not do any labor; thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter; thy servant, nor thy handmaid, nor thy beasts, nor thy sojourner who is within thy gates. Because in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all which in them is and he rested in the seventh day; for this cause Jehovah blessed the day of the Sabbath, and pronounced it holy." The reader will notice in this word-for-word translation just the contrary to what Dr. Dwight teaches; we are told to remember the day of the Sabbath, and reminded that Jehovah blessed the day of the Sabbath, and not the institution only. But even if he did take the words just as they are in our King James's edition it does not appear how he could separate the institution from the day. Christ said, "The Sabbath was made for man," and how it was made we read in Gen. 2:2, 3 and Ex. 20:11. The highest authority in the universe tells us it was made out of the seventh day, and the facts of God's creative work and of his rest upon the last day of the first week of time. Therefore you cannot change the day without destroying the institution. But to prove by plain text of Scripture that the blessing and sanctification were inseparably connected with the seventh day, let us quote Gen. 2:2, 3: "And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." Oh, how the first-day advocates hang onto these old threadbare arguments! But after these sophistries are all well sifted, they become as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor; no place can be found for them; and it leaves their advocates just where Absalom was when his hair was caught in the tree, with nothing to stand upon. Let us stand firmly on the sure foundation, and remember that the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord.
ELMER E. FRANKE.
Pittsburg, Penn. Rejecting Reproaches Against Neighbors
By Free Methodist
Taking up a reproach against a neighbor is a dangerous business. One cannot follow it and go to Heaven. Persons have been killed recently by handling old shells that had been dropped twenty-five years ago, during the war. If you should happen to plow up one, you had better bury it again. If people bring to you reproaches against their neighbor, carry them no farther. If they lay them down at your door, leave them there till they die. Positively refuse to have anything to do with them. You take them up at your peril. They are an unclean thing, which we are not permitted to touch. Scandal-mongers should find no market for their wares at the house of a Christian. They may offer to give them to you; but you should spurn all such offers, as you would an offer to give you the small-pox or the yellow fever. THE ABSOLUTENESS OF THE MORAL LAW.
THE sanction of the moral law is not derived, as Mr. Romanes considers, from the fact that it is our interest to obey it. He is greatly in error in supposing that the reason why it is the chief end of man to glorify God is because this is the happiest thing for him to do. That is not the reason. And that Mr. Romanes can suppose it to be the reason is a melancholy testimony to the absolutely unethical nature of his philosophy. The moral law is absolute. The obligation of the categorical imperative does not arise from the fact that we shall be comfortable if we obey it. A thing is right simply because it is right. Neither personal nor tribal advantage is the measure of ethics. The idea of obligation has not its root in the idea of utility. The concept of justice is not derivate; it is original. Honesty may be the best policy, but a thing is not honest because it is politic. "Virtue alone is happiness below," Pope declares in his splendid verse, and he is right. But it is not because of the reward inherent in it that virtue is virtue. "The idea of duty differs by the whole diameter of existence from the idea of self-interest." True it is, and the first of truths, that— "Because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom, in the scorn of consequence." Consequence! It is beside the question. "Better were it," says Cardinal Newman, "for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul should tell one willful untruth, though it harm no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse." This is the language of the theologian. But the philosopher gives a like judgment. "The dictum, 'All's well that ends well,'" Kant happily observes, "has no place in morals." And morals have no real place in any philosophy which bases itself on the doctrines of utilitarianism.—The Forum. THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. NO. 4.
By W.
IF we examine the heathen world, we shall find that the deception by which Eve fell was the same by which they plunged into abominable idolatries. Pride, the exaltation of self to the place of Deity, resulted in degradation; for "pride goeth before destruction," and "when pride cometh, then cometh shame." Paul also is authority for the statement that when one is "lifted up with pride," he is in danger of falling "into the condemnation of the devil." 1 Tim. 3:6. Although there was heathenism centuries before the time of Plato, we may take the heathenism of his day as a type of all, since it was he who first systematized the so-called philosophy of the heathen. Everybody knows that one of the cardinal points in Plato's philosophy was the theory of the immortality of the soul; but perhaps comparatively few realize that this doctrine of his sprung directly from the idea that the soul of man is itself supreme, a part of God. We quote the following concerning his teaching:— "There is no doctrine on which Plato more frequently or more strenuously insists than this,—that soul is not only superior to body, but prior to it in point of time, and that not only as it exists in the being of God, but in every order of existence. The soul of the world existed first, and then it was clothed with a material body. The souls which animate the sun, moon, and stars existed before the bodies which they inhabit. The pre-existence of human souls is one of the arguments on which he relies to prove its immortality."—Prof. W. S. Tyler, of Amherst College, in Schaff-Herzog Cyclopædia. By the following quotation from Priestly's "Heathen Philosophy," it will be seen that this doctrine of the pre-existence of human souls, upon which Plato built his doctrine of their immortality, is in reality a claim that the soul is self-existent, or, in other words, that each soul is a god:— " 'Every soul,' he says (Phædrus) 'is immortal. That which is always in motion is from eternity, but that which is moved by another must have an end.' Accordingly he maintained the pre-existence as well as the immortality of the soul; and in the East these two doctrines always went together, and are always ascribed to Pythagoras; the soul and the body being supposed to have only a temporary connection, to answer a particular purpose. 'The soul existed,' he says (De Leg., lib. 10), 'before bodies were produced, and it is the chief agent in the changes and the management of the body.' Agreeably to this doctrine, Plato maintained that all the knowledge we seem to acquire here is only the recollection of what we knew in a former state." The heathen philosophy, therefore, was simply a deification of the human. The mind of man was made the "lord of itself and all the world beside," a part of God, and consequently answerable only to itself. Now what was the result of this self-exaltation? The apostle Paul gives the answer. Speaking of the heathen, he says that they are without excuse,— "Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves; who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever." Rom. 1:21-25. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." Pride, which caused the fall of Satan, was at the bottom of their degradation. To be sure they had knowledge, and made great progress in the arts, but they attributed whatever knowledge they had to their own innate superiority. They looked within for everything, and began to worship themselves, because in their conceit they couldn't imagine anything else in the universe so worthy of worship as themselves. Thus that which they did know contributed to their folly, because they cut themselves loose from the only source of wisdom. The light that was in them became darkness, and the darkness was very great. Now read the further consequence of their claim that they possessed the attributes of Deity:— "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind [margin, "a mind void of judgment"], to do those things which are not convenient [not proper]; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful; who knowing the judgments of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them." Rom. 1:28-32. Quotations from history might be given to any extent, to show that the first chapter of Romans does accurately describe the moral condition of the ancient heathen world; but they are not necessary to our present purpose. We merely wish to show that the working of the spirit of antichrist is the same in all ages of the world; that since the elevation of man to an equality with Deity by claiming for him inherent immortality, was the cause of the moral degradation of the ancient heathen, the same thing in this age will result in the same way. Compare the quotation in the preceding paragraph with Gal. 5:19-21, and it will be seen that the two lists of sins are almost identical, and that when men became so swelled up with pride that they fancied themselves gods, and thus cut themselves loose from God, the abominable practices into which they fell were simply the outcroppings of their own human nature which they were worshiping instead of God. But there are only two great opposing forces,—Christ and antichrist,—and when men cast off their allegiance to God, they necessarily enlist under the banner of Satan. And so while the heathen were exalting self, they were in reality worshiping the devil. It could not be otherwise. In harmony with this conclusion, are the words of Paul: "But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God; and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils." 1 Cor. 10:20. The psalmist, also, describing the apostasy of the Israelites, says that they "were mingled among the heathen, and learned their works. And they served their idols, which were a snare unto them. Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils." Ps. 106:35-37. From Lev. 17:7 and Deut. 32:15-17, also, we learn that when the Jews forsook the Lord, and practiced heathen worship, they sacrificed to devils. Heathenism everywhere, and in all ages of the world, is simply some form of devil worship. The ancient heathen, like modern Spiritualists, consulted with "familiar" spirits, as we learn from Deut. 18:9-12:— "When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord; and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee." The most noted of these places where the ancients consulted with familiar spirits were the oracles of Apollo, at Dodona, Delphi, and Trophonius, in Greece. The priests and priestesses who conveyed the messages of these oracles to the people, would in these days be called mediums, clairvoyants, etc. It is well known that the philosopher Socrates had a familiar spirit, a dæmon, without whose advice he would do nothing. From the Gospel in All Lands (September, 1887) we take the following extract concerning the religion of the inhabitants of Java:— "The native Javanese . . . are Mohammedans as much as anything. In former times they were Buddhists and Brahmins. They worship their ancestors, and seem to have gathered something from every system of religion with which they have come in contact. The number of the spirits worshiped is almost without limit. In nearly every place there is a patron spirit to whose influence the good or bad fortune of the village is ascribed." Concerning the religion of the inhabitants of Ceylon, the same authority says:— "Buddha has a multitude of followers among the Cingalese. But mild and moral as his doctrines are, they have failed 'to arrest man in his career of passion and pursuit,' and many of his so-called followers have stolid indifference for religion of any form. 'Yet, strange to say, under this coldness there are superstitious fires whose flames overtop the icy summits of Buddhist philosophy,' and excite a deeper awe in the mind of the Cingalese. Hence, demon-worship, their earliest form of religion, is still extant. Devil-priests, on every domestic occurrence, and in their calamities, are called in, and their barbarous ceremonies performed. Devil-dancers are implicitly relied upon in times of sickness, and before the patient they personate the demon which is afflicting him, and spend the night in performing fiendish rites, and in the morning exorcise the demon and go away with the rich offering, praying that the life of the sufferer may be spared. Buddhist priests connive at this worship, and even practice it, because they cannot suppress it." Like the Javanese, the Chinese, also, as is well known, worship their ancestors, and their gods, like those of the heathen of Greece and Rome, are simply deified dead men and women, whose fame is thus perpetuated. Anybody who has been in a Chinese "Joss House," has seen, among the images of supposed ancient heroes and sages, a "good devil" and perhaps a "bad devil," whose favor must be gained, or whose wrath propitiated; and one can scarcely pass through a street in a Chinese village without seeing the burning tapers which are designed to drive the evil spirits away. And so if all the nations of heathendom were passed in review, it would be seen that the Scripture writers were correct in their statements that the heathen sacrifice to devils. A HOLY DAY, NOT A HOLIDAY.
By Editor
THE Christian Church News (Oakland) says:— "The Seventh-day Adventists believe that Saturday ought to be kept as a holiday of rest now by all Christendom, but they are not willing to affirm it openly and publicly." Possibly the News thinks that it has warrant for such a statement; if so, we are happy to tell it, and others who may be equally misinformed, the exact truth about the matter. In the first place let it be understood that Seventh-day Adventists hold to no belief which they are not willing to affirm openly and publicly. Such a charge is a little out of the usual order, for they are usually complained of as being too ready to urge their belief upon the attention of others. They hold to nothing which they are not willing to have brought to the light of day, and upon which they do not invite the freest criticism, believing that truth will survive every attack upon it, and will shine the brighter for those attacks; and they do not wish to hold any doctrine which is not truth. Secondly, it is a gross error to say that "Seventh-day Adventists believe that Saturday ought to be kept as a holiday of rest now by all Christendom." Nothing in the world is further from their desire. They do believe that the seventh day of the week, commonly called Saturday, ought to be kept as the Sabbath of the Lord, not simply by all Christendom, but by all the world; the obligation rests759 upon the infidel and the heathen, as well as on the professed Christian, because when God said: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work," he addressed the whole world, and not any special class. "The Sabbath was made for man," and therefore the obligation to keep it rests upon all mankind. But Seventh-day Adventists do not believe that Saturday ought to be kept as a holiday by anybody. It is a holy day, made such by the Creator himself, and so it ought to be kept. To observe the seventh day as a holiday,—a day of amusement, joy, and gaiety,—would be to violate the commandment of God, and we not only believe, but we know that that commandment ought to be strictly observed by every person in the world. This we and all Seventh-day Adventists are willing and anxious to declare openly and publicly, at all times and in all places. Let it be forever remembered, however, that when we say that all men ought to keep the seventh day, we do not mean to intimate that they should be forced to do so, nor that anybody should attempt to force them to keep it. This follows as a natural consequence of the fact that the Sabbath is a holy day and not a holiday. Civil laws cannot make a holy day, neither can they enforce the observance of a holy day. If the State were to attempt to enforce the observance of a holy day, it would at the best succeed in making men hypocrites, but it could not secure the proper observance of the day. And since anything less than the proper observance of the Sabbath is sin, it is evident that for the State to attempt to enforce the observance of the Sabbath would be to strengthen men in sin, by making them believe that the outward observance of the Sabbath, which is all that the State could exact, is all that God requires. It would, in fact, be compelling men to sin. Therefore, even if Seventh-day Adventists were in the majority, which we are sure they never will be, we should be utterly opposed to any movement looking toward the enforced observance of the seventh day. While we are free to declare our belief in regard to Sabbath, we are just as free to declare our sentiments in regard to Sunday. Sunday was from the beginning of its career only a holiday, the "wild solar holiday of all pagan times." The Catholic Church adopted it, along with many other heathen customs, from the pagans, by which she so conciliated them that they gave her their allegiance; and the Protestant churches have received it as a legacy from the Catholic Church. Since the most that can be said for Sunday is that it is only a holiday of the church, without any divine sanction whatever, there is no obligation resting upon anybody to keep it. It has no more sacredness than Monday or Tuesday, or any other working day of the week. This we are willing to affirm openly and publicly, and we have no fear that our statement will be disproved. But although Sunday is not a sacred day, it is a religious institution, an institution of the church. Therefore when the State makes laws enforcing its observance even as a holiday, it goes beyond its right. To compel men to observe Sunday is to compel them to commit sin; for men will not rest upon two days of the week, and if they are compelled to rest on Sunday, they are thereby forced to labor upon the Sabbath, thus disobeying the commandment of God. Moreover, even though men would observe both days, if their conscience would not allow them to disobey God, Sunday laws would still be iniquitous, because they tend to elevate Sunday above the other working days of the week. Therefore we are willing to affirm openly and publicly that we are utterly and uncompromisingly opposed to Sunday laws of every kind and degree. We are opposed to them not because they would interfere with our rights as citizens, but because they are against the rights of every citizen. The gospel gives to every man the fullest liberty of choice as to whether or not he will obey God. "Whosoever will, let him come," is the gospel call, and this invitation carries with it the negative, that whosoever is not inclined may stay away from the waters of life. Now when the State makes laws concerning any establishment of religion, it cuts directly across this freedom of choice. It compels some to do that which their conscience tells them they ought not to do; it forbids others to change their practice when their conscience shall become enlightened; and it compels others to conform to a religious practice, when they have no conscience at all in the matter. If anybody wishes a more explicit declaration of our position upon this matter, we are prepared to give it, and to answer any questions that may be asked. IS IT TEMPERANCE OR SUNDAY?
By W.
THE Independent, in its notice of the recent meeting of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, at Nashville, Tenn., makes the following comment on the resolution which was passed in favor of Sunday liquor laws:— "It is our opinion that the great fight against liquor will be made more successfully on a much broader platform than that of a Sunday law. It is possible to make so much of the Sunday feature of the law as to injure the cause, and of this there is some danger." THE Independent is correct; if the fight against the liquor traffic is ever to be successful, it will have to be made on a basis much broader than that of a Sunday law. For although a Sunday liquor law might be secured, the liquor traffic would still be entrenched as strongly as ever, yes, even more strongly than ever. Perhaps this may not be apparent to all, for many imagine that to oppose the so-called Sunday liquor laws is to array one's self on the side of the saloons, and against temperance. This can easily be shown to be an error. In the first place, the passage of a Sunday prohibitory liquor law gives the liquor traffic a legal status on other days. It is true that it is not expressly declared that liquor selling is right on other days than Sunday; but the natural inference from a law declaring it to be wrong to sell liquor on Sundays is that it is all right to sell it on other days. The mother says to her boy, "Johnnie, you must not play with your ball to-day; it is Sunday." The only idea Johnnie would get would be that it is wrong to play ball on Sunday; he certainly would never get the idea that it is not right to play ball at other times; and the mother would not expect him to. If the boy were doing anything that is wrong in itself, smoking, for instance, she would use different language. She would say, "You must not do that, my son;" and this she would say on Monday or Wednesday just the same as on Sunday. If she should say, "You must not smoke to-day; it is Sunday," the boy would conclude at once that all the wrong consisted in doing the act on Sunday, but that his mother would not object to his smoking on any other day. Even so to discriminate, and say that liquor shall not be sold on Sunday, is to say in effect that liquor-selling is all right in itself on any other day than Sunday. This idea is strengthened by the fact that those who oppose the "Sunday saloon" also oppose the Sunday newspaper, the Sunday railroad train, Sunday mails, etc., things which are perfectly legitimate in themselves. By classing the "Sunday saloon" with these other things, the professed temperance people lift it to the same level. But it is argued by many that the Sunday prohibitory liquor law is a move in the right direction, and that it is best to take what they can get, hoping for more by and by. They say they expect to get prohibition sometime, but they cannot get it all at once, and so they will take prohibition on one day. It is strange that the fallacy of this plea cannot be seen by everybody at a single glance. It is right here that we find the plainest kind of evidence that the Sunday liquor law is not a move in behalf of temperance, but is only a movement for the protection of Sunday. Suppose for a moment that the movers in this affair were all true temperance men,—men who believe that the liquor traffic ought to be prohibited because it is an evil, and only an evil, to society,—does anyone suppose that they would be content with closing the saloons on Sunday only? No; when once they had massed their strength sufficiently to close the saloons on one day in the week they would close them every day. If they want total prohibition, there is no reason on earth why they shouldn't get what they want, if they have the power to secure prohibition one day in the week. With their hands once on the monster's throat they would not relax their grasp until it was choked to death. It matters not that many of those who strenuously favor a Sunday liquor law are honest in their intentions, and are really actuated by temperance principles, the fact remains that there are not enough of such ones to carry the thing, for if there were they would have absolute prohibition. Those who look no further than the protection of Sunday are largely in the majority. We say again that the securing of a Sunday prohibitory law is not a move in the direction of total prohibition, but rather against it; for the fact that a lot of professed temperance men have the power in their hands to prohibit the liquor traffic, and stop short with prohibiting it one day in the week, will give that traffic a prestige that it has never before had. We conclude, therefore, that the whole thing centers around Sunday, and is prompted, with few exceptions, by no other motive than to protect that day from desecration. If any feel inclined to dispute the proposition still further, and claim that the only desire is to protect the homes of the people—that Sunday is a general holiday, and if the saloons are allowed to keep open, the laboring men and the youth, being idle, will be enticed into them more than at any other time, we would call attention to the fact that the working men are at liberty from about 5 o'clock Saturday afternoon, and that from then till midnight they have seven hours' holiday, during which time the saloons are in full blast, and still there is no attempt on foot to abolish the Saturday-night saloon. There is ample opportunity for the laborers to spend all their money in drink before Sunday morning, and too often this is done. If this is a "home-protection movement," then let it cover all the time when homes are in danger. More than this, the youth are usually at leisure the whole of Saturday, yet the "temperance" zeal reaches no further than the suppressing the Sunday saloon. The more arguments men bring to bear to support the Sunday prohibitory law, the more is its real nature disclosed. We repeat, the movement is against temperance, rather than in its favor, and wholly in the interest of the Sunday. The following from the Christian Statesman, of December, 1887, will bear out this assertion. It occurs in the report of a National Reform meeting in Philadelphia:— "The Rev. Dr. Barr showed how a consistent national Christianity would throw open to religious influence large classes of men and women who are now utterly inaccessible. For example, there are from six to ten thousand saloon-keepers in this city, who, from the very nature of their business, cannot be reached with the gospel. A Christian Government would abolish their business, and leave them free to be reached like other men." This, of course, looks toward entire suppression, but the principle is the same. In a meeting in the interest of a Sunday law, held in Oakland last winter, Rev. Dr. Briggs complained that the churches were charged with the duty of instructing the people in morals, and then, on account of the absence of any Sunday law, the people were free to wander into all places of amusement, so that the churches could not get at them. And whenever any "Sunday temperance" movement is sifted to the bottom, this will be found to be the ultimate object. THE Independent is right; if the professed temperance people of the country want to make any real headway against liquor, they will have to build a much broader platform than Sunday laws; for when their Sunday laws shall have been passed, liquor will be here still, and more strongly entrenched than ever. "The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth." Ps. 145:18. PLAN OF BIBLICAL COURSE FOR 1888.
By Alonzo T. Jones
It has been thought best that I should say a word in regard to the work contemplated in the Biblical Course the coming quarter. First, we want to make it as profitable as possible to all who attend, whether they have been there before or not. Therefore we expect to give as full a view of the present truth as is possible in the time that we shall have. This work in the regular Bible-class will be carried forward much in the same form as a series of sermons would be in a new place, where it was certain that the minister would remain fifteen weeks. This on the part of the teacher. Then it will be the work of the students to learn to make Bible-readings, following the same course. Secondly, we wish to make this term one of special interest and profit to those who have publicly labored in the cause, or who intend to do so. Therefore all these will form a special class, and in addition to the course named above, will be given: (1) The history of the rise and establishment of the Papacy, and of the formation of the union of Church and State, both in the establishment of the Papacy, and in the making of the image to the Papacy, which is fast approaching in our own country; (2) drill in speaking; (3) drill in writing reports of sermons, and of meetings, and in writing articles for the press; (4) drill in reading, especially in reading the Scriptures, and hymns. In short, it is intended to make this class a school of practice for work in the field, so that when the school term is ended, and the students go into the field to work, they will be simply going on with that which they have been doing in the class. In this class we want to do everything that can be done to profit those who take the course, and to make them efficient in the work to which we hope they have devoted their lives.