The next number of THE SENTINEL, No. 37, date of September 22, will be one of special value, particularly for new readers, and for those who have not kept themselves thoroughly posted on the working of the National Reform leaven in our national Government.
Every reader of THE SENTINEL ought to order several extra copies of this number for distribution among his friends. This issue ought to reach one hundred thousand copies, and it will if the friends of the paper do their duty in circulating it.
Extra copies of No. 37 will be furnished at one dollar per hundred or eight dollars per thousand. Send in your orders at once that we may know how many to have printed.
Papers Wanted.
FRANK JEFFERS, of Lemoore, Tulare County, Cal., writes that he has 'good use for back numbers of THE AMERICAN SENTINEL, and asks that those who have such to spare send them to him, post paid, at the above address.
MANY regard liberty of conscience as one thing and liberty to practice according to the dictates of conscience as quite another thing. But there is and can be no liberty of conscience without liberty of action. The Constitutions of most of the States of the Union contain some guarantee of liberty of conscience. The Constitution of Tennessee, for instance, provides “that no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience.” This would seem to be ample provision, and yet the courts of Tennessee have so far ignored it as to practically nullify it by making it guarantee only the right to believe and practice the tenets of one’s sect, without the right to disregard laws made in aid of other sects. But this is a vital point; the conscientious Christian can not practice that which he does not believe.
But those who keep the seventh day ask no laws requiring others to keep it also. They are not disturbed because others are at work while they are resting. They simply ask to be let alone in the enjoyment of their natural right to work when they please and to rest when they feel tired or when their sense of duty to God moves them to rest. They ask no special legislation in their behalf, and they insist that there should be none in the interests of other religionists.
INSTEAD of entering a vigorous and manly protest against the persecution of Seventh-day Adventists, a Baptist paper in this city, enters upon a labored defense of Sunday laws, and incidentally remarks:—
If there are any whose consciences oblige them to rest from labor on some other day, they may be relieved from the hardship of a double Sabbath by being permitted to pursue their ordinary callings on Sunday—only so as not to disturb others in the enjoyment of their day of rest.
But what would constitute a disturbance of others? Some people are very much “disturbed” by the mere knowledge that their neighbors rest on the seventh day while they work, and work on the first day while they rest. And in at least one State this annoyance has been held by the courts to amount to a public nuisance, and Christian men have been imprisoned as common criminals under this legal fiction. Such a permission as our Baptist contemporary proposes may mean something or nothing according to the whim of the courts.