THE editor of the Argonaut, San Francisco, thinks the failure to recognize the Deity in our national charter is a serious omission to the extent even of being unconstitutional, because it is thereby a recognition of “the no-God religion of the atheist,” which is about as erratic a statement as it is possible for one to make. This doctrine of recognizing a certain thing because a certain other thing is not mentioned is a brand new idea, and it bounds out bright from the mint of Mr. Pixley’s brain. It is as absurd, however, as it would be to maintain that the President in his message recognized free trade because he failed to mention the tariff. We do not see why, upon this principle, this Nation does not recognize Christianity or the one-God religion of the Christian, because it has failed to put atheism in the Constitution. These Constitution tinkers not only give evidence of being in a poor business, but of having parted company with common sense as well.
The idea of recognizing atheism by failing to even hint at it is about as foolish54as could be imagined. It is as if we should say that an architect in drawing the plans of a building meant to incorporate a subterranean dungeon in the specifications because no provisions were made for an open court, or for light in the centre of the building. It would do no good to recognize the Deity in the Constitution. The people would believe him no more, nor would they honor him more in the national and individual life, nor would he be pleased with allusions to him, when respect for his authority would be no greater with than without them. God knows the heart and temper of nations, and it is not necessary to tell him how they regard him, nor in what esteem they hold him. It is safe to say that the people of this Nation care less for the Almighty than they do for themselves. They spend more money in the service of the devil than they do in his service. When the people spend $1,500,000,000 for whisky and tobacco and but $100,000,000 or less for education and the Christian religion, it is a poor thing to begin to make complimentary mention of the Deity in any such public way. As long as this Nation has such little practical faith in God it had best wait a while before it begins to parade its faith in him before the world. The Pharisees professed to have great respect for the God of their fathers, but in their daily lives they denied him. We want no national Phariseeism. There is too much in private.—Fresno Inquirer.
Sunday Closing in Denver.
Sometime ago, the city government of Denver, Colorado, passed a Sunday-closing ordinance, similar to that which has recently been enacted in Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, and to that which is asked for here. At first, and for a time, there was a show of enforcing the ordinance in Denver; but now, according to the statements of the local press, the law is “a dead letter.” It will doubtless be so in this State. The Sunday-closing ordinance will probably not long be enforced in Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, and it would not be here, should it be passed. It would speedily fall into the same condition as the State Sunday law, for years before its repeal—completely inoperative and thoroughly ignored. As the Colorado Graphic says: “No Sunday law was ever enforced thoroughly and permanently.”
Especially must this be the case in a country where Church and State are entirely separate, and the civil Government is pledged to protect all religions alike and favor none. Those who observe the seventh day (Saturday) as the Sabbath, have the same right to governmental recognition and protection as those who observe the first day of the week as their religious rest day. Jews and Christians stand equal before the law.
The pretense that the Sunday-closing law is asked for simply in the interest of temperance, good health, and the public peace and welfare, and not that of a religious dogma, is a very false and shallow one. It deceives nobody. Laws enforcing public order and hygienic conditions are as necessary one day of the week as another. Temperance and cleanliness are no more desirable on Sunday than on Monday or Tuesday. It is only a peculiar phase of religious belief that would distinguish Sunday above the other days of the week. Whatever church drill and partisan zeal may be able to accomplish in the way of legal enactments enforcing Sunday observance, the good sense and free spirit of the people will render them null and void. —Oakland, California, Times.
In a Nutshell.
By H. F. PHELPS
EIGHT REASONS WHY A CHRISTIAN SHOULD FOREVER STAND OPPOSED TO THE SCHEMES OF THE NATIONAL REFORMERS.
1. THEIR schemes call upon men to do that which is in direct violation of the words of our Lord, where he says: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” And there is not a man among them that would be willing to put himself in the other man’s shoes, and take the consequences, if their plans win.
2. It is taking the sword of the civil power, and Christ has said, “All they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword.” And in appealing to the civil power, they virtually acknowledge that they have lost the power of the Spirit of God in their work.
3. Their position is that “the kingdom of Christ is through the gateway of politics.” Now this flatly contradicts the words of Christ. He says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
4. It exalts the power of the State above the power of God, and this is directly in opposition to the teaching of the good book that says, “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Eccl. 12:13. And the Apostle Peter, when brought before the civil authorities, made answer, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” Acts 5:29.
5. They are looking for, and expecting, a theocracy to be established here, and they are working to that end. A theocracy is where God is his own law maker, and appoints his own law administrators. This is again in direct opposition to the words of the prophet. There never was but one theocracy in this world, and that was the theocracy of Israel. And when that theocracy was overthrown by the kingdom of Babylon, God said: “I will overturn, overturn, overturn it: and it shall be no more until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him.” Ezek. 21:27. So there never will be another theocracy until Christ comes to claim his own.
6. The gospel of our Lord is a gospel of love, and not of force. It persuades; it entreats; it says, come. It was founded in love; it has been carried forward in love. And it can never be carried forward by any other plan. Every experiment of the past, in the direction of force, has been a failure, as it ought to be. It has always manifested the spirit that has been in opposition to the spirit of the Saviour, bringing out some of the darkest passions of the human heart. It always will do the same.
7. The credentials for the propagation of the gospel were given to the Church, and to the Church alone. They were never given to the civil power; and any effort to bring about a change in this matter, is but a plan to effect a change in the plan of Heaven. Such an effort must have the disapprobation of Heaven, and will result in defeat and disaster to all who give their influence in its favor, as it ought to.
8. Christ once said: “Neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” There is no pearl so great as the “pearl of great price;” and this effort will result in nothing else than to bring the religion of the Bible, and the discussion of Bible truths into the realm of politics. This will be lowering the standard of Christianity, and bringing the gospel before those who will not appreciate it. H. F. PHELPS.
ANIMADVERTING upon the King case, the details of which are well known to our readers, that excellent paper, the Colorado Graphic says:—
“Can you believe it, that in this enlightened age, and in the United States of America, a country founded on religious liberty, a fellow-citizen may be sent to jail, and kept there, for working on the first day of the week, commonly called Sunday, when he believes with thousands of others that he should rest on the seventh day of the week? There is a law on the statute books of Tennessee which makes it an offense punishable by imprisonment, for man or woman to labor on the first day of the week. . . .
“Here the State dictates to the Adventist, the Seventh-day Baptist, the Jew, and the Agnostic, and compels him to worship according to civil law, his honest belief to the contrary notwithstanding. The Graphic is an earnest advocate for religious, as well as for personal, liberty, and for this honest cause raises its voice against every attempt made to ecclesiasticize any day in the week, for or against any hobby, on the principle that one step beyond the line of equal rights means the destruction of all restraint, and the final overthrow of both Church and State and the substitution of anarchy instead.”
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A CONTRIBUTOR to Our Day says: “In Wyoming the State Sabbath Reform Association has been strengthened, and it hopes to restore the kidnapped Sabbath law which the last territorial Legislature suddenly repealed. In Utah, the State Association is also awakening to resist the boomerang against the Sabbath that is hidden in the ‘boom’ that comes with Gentile supremacy.”
So it seems that when a Legislature repeals a Sunday law it is guilty of kidnapping! And that the political overthrow of Mormonism, by means of the ballot-box, is a boomerang, because likely to prove dangerous to Sunday laws!
A CORRESPONDENT of the Christian Union says that Bishop Whately reports that as late as the last generation, they deceived themselves by the sophism that “religious liberty was, by all means to be maintained, but not so with irreligious liberty.” But this need occasion no surprise when we consider that many of the present generation deceive themselves by the sophism that “while there should be absolute separation between Church and State, there should not be a separation of religion and the State.” The sophistry of one is as great as of the other.
There can be no union of religion and the State without a union of Church and State, unless, indeed, the Church and religion are entirely separate, which, however, can never be, though the National Reformers seem determined to make it so in order that they may compass their ends.
In this country the term “religion,” when unqualified, means Christianity. It is in this sense that the National Reformers use it. But Christianity is bound up in the Church. The Scriptures declare the Church to be “the pillar and ground of the truth;” therefore the two cannot be separated, and to conjoin religion and the State is also to unite the State and the Church which is “the pillar and ground” of that religion. Therefore, in this as in everything else, National Reform is antichristian.
Of the American Sabbath Union and its Philadelphia meeting, the Sabbath Recorder says:—
While we have believed, and do still believe, that the Union is working from a wrong basis, and for an object which cannot in the end be any help to the spread of the true Christian religion, we cannot look upon this wrangling among Christian men without pain and regret. Why should we leave the word of God and appeal to courts in order “to have the Sabbath generally observed as a day of rest and worship,” any more than we should adopt the same methods to secure any other religious observance? For the declared object of the Union effectually sweeps away the fiction of “a civil Sabbath merely,” about which we have heard so much of late. Let us have all religious observances based upon the consciences of men, enlightened by the word of God and quickened by his Spirit. All else is but empty form so far as any religious character is concerned, and such disgraceful, political wrangles as were witnessed at Philadelphia, are but the legitimate results of the appeal to the civil laws, which appeal carries with it political methods.
Another thought suggests itself to us in this connection; it is this: When men grow so bitter toward each other over only a question of management, what may we not expect their feelings to be toward those who oppose their principles and methods? And does it not go without saying that it would be unsafe to entrust them with the power to coerce their fellows?
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At the time of closing this paper, the case of R. M. King, the Tennessee Adventist, fined by a court of that State for common labor upon Sunday, has not yet been decided by the United States District Court, to which it was carried on writ of habeas corpus. Two weeks ago, we stated that Judge Hammond had decided that he had no jurisdiction in the matter, but this was, it seems, an error. We supposed at the time that our information was reliable, but the event proved otherwise.
REV. T. A. FERNLEY, D. D., is credited by a Philadelphia paper, with the statement, that in a recent conversation which he had with Mr. Blaine, that gentleman had said the World's Fair should be closed on Sunday for hygienic reasons and that the society couldn't do better than print the “Sermon on the Mount,” the best thing ever spoken, and scatter it broadcast. But so far as we are informed neither the Doctor nor the Secretary has explained the connection between the Sermon on the Mount and the Sunday closing of the World's Fair.
At a late meeting of the Board of Managers of the American Sabbath Union, resolutions of confidence in President Shepard’s management were passed. Arrangements were made for publishing a quarterly journal to be entitled the American Sabbath Union, and to bear the inscription “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day,” under the editorial charge of the general Secretary, the Rev. J. H. Knowles, D. D., with the Rev. James P. Mills, district Secretary of the Sixth District, as assistant editor, residing at Chicago. Provisions were also made for the employment of an attorney at law for the prosecution of violators of the Sunday laws. A resolution was adopted protesting against any change in the Sunday laws of New Jersey, and the general Secretary was instructed to forward a copy of the same to the Legislature of that State, at Trenton.
In his address, at the Philadelphia meeting, the President of the American Sabbath Union criticised certain labor organizations for holding their meetings on Sunday. At these meetings, people were, he said, harangued by orators, who while denying the existence of a God, appeal for the God-given rights of the down-trodden toilers. If the Sabbath Union would organize, said he, to make the Sabbath known to these men, it would do a great work. “The mission work should be carried to them and to those precious walking delegates who go around making trouble. These busybodies would soon be out of work, and their organizations would crumble into dust if it were made possible to enforce Sunday observance.”
THE Philadelphia Sabbath Association, the oldest organization of its kind in this country, has frowned on General O. O. Howard and Dr. George Dana Boardman. At a recent meeting of the Association, John Alexander, a member, objected to the approval of the Secretary’s report in so far as it says “that Dr. Boardman and General Howard ably filled the bill with speeches,” at the American Sabbath Union anniversary, held in this city a few weeks ago. He said the doctrine enunciated by the two gentlemen was unsound, and he for one didn’t approve of it. He said it was wrong to have a meeting held at the First Baptist Church, because Dr. Boardman was not in sympathy with the Association’s ideas of the Sabbath. “General Howard’s speech was full of heresy,” Mr. Alexander said. “I think that was the most unfortunate meeting that I ever attended. I hope that the Board will never meet again in a church where the pastor is not in sympathy with us.” The report was amended and approved.
THERE are said to be twenty-eight associations, in California, working for the passage of a Sunday law in that State.
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