p. 16 | Signs of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 37. (9/17/1896)

THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE

Or Civil Government and Religion

BY ALONZO T. JONES

An Up-to-Date Pamphlet on the Principles of Religious Liberty.

“THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE” contains fifteen chapters, the following being a portion of the chapter headings:—Christianity and the Roman Empire—What is Due to God and What to Caesar—The Powers That Be—How the United States Became a Nation—What Is the Nation?—Who Made the Nation?—Religious Right in the United States—Religious Rights Invaded—The People’s Right of Appeal—National Precedent on Right of Appeal—Sunday-law Movement in the Fourth Century and Its Parallel in the Nineteenth—Will the People Assert and Maintain Their Rights?—Religious Rights in the States.

In the four appendixes to the book are given the Declaration of Independence—The Constitution of the United States—The Dred Scott Decision, and the “Christian Nation” Decision.

This is a book of permanent value for reference and study, and one that all should possess. It contains 384 pages, with several illustrations, is issued as No. 3 of the Religious Liberty Library, and is bound in paper covers. Price 40 Cents.

A FINER EDITION on laid paper is also ready. It is neatly bound in cloth. Price One Dollar.

Address orders to

PACIFIC PRESS PUBLISHING CO., Oakland, California.

28 West Fifth Street, Kansas City, Mo.

43 Bond Street, New York City.

Christ and the Sabbath

CHRIST AND THE SABBATH: Or Christ in the Old Testament and the Sabbath in the New, by Elder James White. Paper covers, fifty-six pages, sent post-paid for ten cents.

PACIFIC PRESS, Oakland, Cal.

Kansas City, Mo. New York City, N. Y.

Sunday Laws and Court Decisions

By Editor

The people who wish Sunday enforced by human law (they have no divine law) ought to be willing to accept the decisions of courts. Suit has begun in North Carolina to test the law against railroads that run on Sunday, the Christian Statesman tells us. We suppose the Statesman will be willing to abide the decision, either adverse or favorable. But it will not. Sunday law people will hold to “the divine right” of courts in a decision favorable to Sunday laws, but they have no respect for the courts in adverse decisions. Those who hold to the Bible Sabbath and the Gospel method of promoting truth, are never so troubled. A court decision, whether it emanate from a justice of the peace or the Supreme Court is nothing as regards religious questions or questions of conscience. The observation of the Sabbath or its non-observance by other men is something with which judges or legislators have nothing to do. And we are glad that there are yet men occupying these responsible positions that realize this great and fundamental truth of good and legitimate civil government.

“RIGHTS” AND “RIGHT.”

The Declaration of Independence declares most truly that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These “rights” are natural; they are given of God to each in common with all. No man or set of men have the right to deprive their fellow man of these rights, however humble and unpretending or few he may be. Number or wealth or education has nothing to do with the matter. Among these rights are life. Each man has the right to life, and he can not be deprived of it only as he forfeits that right by depriving his fellow man of the same right. Each man has liberty to go or come, to do or not to do, to believe or not to believe, to worship or not to worship, so long as he does not infringe upon the equal rights of his fellows.

But the exercise of these rights is subject to himself. If a person wishes to bind his conscience by a creed and his actions by the decrees of a pope or council, he has the right to do this, if his actions do not contravene the equal rights of his fellows. He may make himself a veritable slave by thus yielding his personal freedom; it is his right thus to do, but no one else has the right to compel otherwise. The pursuit of happiness is his right, but he may pursue misery if he so elect. His fellows may not compel happiness, because they can not. To endeavor so to do would bring the misery of slavery.

Freedom under the Stars and Stripes permits the male citizen of this country over twenty-one years of age to exercise his franchise at the polls under the same conditions as all other citizens. This is one of his rights, which he may exercise or not as he elects; but it would not be right for his fellow citizens to seek to compel him to vote. Such an attempt would deprive him of his liberty. The exercise, or non-exercise, of such rights belongs to him. In fact, he might not conscientiously be able to exercise such a right; it might not be right for him to do this; he would violate his conscience if he did. For instance, he might believe in a high tariff “for protection” and “free silver.” He is conscientiously opposed to a “gold standard,” a waiting bimetalism, and a low tariff, or a tariff for “revenue.” It would not be right for him to vote otherwise than he believes. Where would he vote? We have two Democratic parties, the Republican party, the National, the Prohibition, the Socialist parties. But not one of these holds to what seems to our conscientious citizen the two cardinal principles of the country’s needs. To him, therefore, it would not be right to exercise the right of franchise, and it would not be right to compel him so to do.

It is so religiously. One may observe the Sabbath or not as he will. It is a matter which lies between him and God. It may be right for him to do this, and wrong not to do it; but it is his right, so far as his fellow men are concerned, to do wrong in this respect if he choose. And no earthly government can compel him to do right. They may compel him to seem to do right, but the result is that they have made a slave and a hypocrite. The matter lies solely between the individual man and God. He may be persuaded; he can not be compelled.

An understanding of these principles would greatly help in these days of recrudescence of political and religious tyranny.

The Objects of Civil Government

In our article on the “Objects of Civil Government” we have not quoted from Mr. Bryan because he is the candidate for any particular political party, but because of the value of the sentiments expressed, and the clear, concise definition and good illustration given, as to why civil governments should exist.

Send for a Bible Catalog

*Send for a Bible Catalog.—Our Kansas City House has gotten out a neat 20-page Bible Catalog, which they will send free to any address west of the Missouri River and east of the Rocky Mountains, including all of Colorado. Send your address on a postal card to Pacific Press Pub. Co., No. 18 West Fifth Street, Kansas City, Mo.*

The Armenians

According to the reports of those who seem to be well-informed missionaries, the revolutionists among the Armenians are worse than the Turks. The latter are cruel and blood-thirsty, but the former are no less so, goading the Turks on by various means in the hope that the nations of Europe will either destroy the Turk or form an independent Armenian state. We pity the Armenians, who are truly Christians, and who are between the two fires of their own misguided and cruelly selfish ambitious brethren and the zealous and cruel Mohammedan zeal of the Turk.

Intemperance

Intemperance.—It is said by some one who has calculated the matter that the 240,000 saloons of this country alone, placed in a solid column would extend a distance of 1,000 miles. Both sides of a street, they would give a solid frontage of 500 miles. They would make 100 streets, each 5 miles long. What an amount of wretchedness and woe and misery and crime and evil of every sort is here represented. From these 240,000 schools of vice 600,000 drunkards annually graduate, 100,000 of whom are boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty; 100,000 of these drunkards die every year. In all these festering pools of sin woman has an active part. The United States census tells us that there are 9 distillers, 72 brewers, 105 dealers, 2,275 saloon-keepers, and 147 bartenders that are women.

“THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES.”

By Editor

Not the various omens around us, indicative of the times in which we are living, but the paper by that name. It is of this we wish to speak.

Do You Take It? Do Your Neighbors and Friends?

Why not? It can not be the price which binds, for it is only $1.00 a year. Think of it, a sixteen-page paper, filled with good, religious and moral reading, visiting your home for fifty times each year, for the small sum of one dollar. For the amount of information it contains there is no cheaper paper published in the United States.

Notes and News.—There are those among our readers who take the SIGNS OF THE TIMES for this department alone. They say they get more genuine news in the SIGNS than they do in regular secular newspapers. But this is the department of the least value of all.

Your neighbor might want it for the International Sunday school lessons, which are specially treated with suggestive questions. For years there have been those who have taken the paper to obtain these lessons.

But above and beyond any of these minor departments are our Editorial and General Articles departments. All the living religious questions of the day are here treated. The Word of God, the Prophecies relating to our time, the Second Coming of our Lord, the Law of God, the Sabbath Question in all of its various phases, the Priesthood and Kingdom of Christ, the Reward of the Saints, and, not least, Present Truth, Present Duty, and Vital Godliness are subjects of which the SIGNS OF THE TIMES will be full for the year to come. Can you afford to be without it?

The days are growing shorter, the evenings longer; now is the time for family reading. Has the paper benefited you? Bring it before your friends and neighbors. Will not our readers help us?

A Christian's Pledge.

—Says a writer in the Pacific Christian: “There is no other one sin by which the church of Christ has been more constantly disgraced and humiliated than that of broken pledges. If a Christian buys a hundred pounds of sugar from a grocer, he does not for a moment doubt his moral obligation to pay for it. When the time comes to pay his taxes to the state there is no question in his mind about the dishonesty of refusing to pay them. If there is one honest debt that a Christian is under greater moral obligation to pay than another, it is the pledge he has made to the servants of God. The obligation is really to the Lord, whether the man to whom it is to be paid is a church janitor, a preacher, or the editor and publisher of a church paper.” It is all true, isn’t it, reader? Well, let it not be true in your case.

Christ’s Kingdom and Politics

The Christian Statesman says: “That something is wrong, all feel. All kinds of remedies are suggested except the right one. The politician and the partisan press will not engage in the work of educating the people in the great principles of civil government as taught in the Bible.” This is true, and the worst teacher of all in this respect is the Christian Statesman. Jesus Christ will not be made king by votes now any more than he would be when on earth. They who thus think to enthrone him politically but enthrone the man of sin. He is not the “god of forces,” but the God of infinite love. When he does reign on the earth, it will not be through “the gateway of politics;” “the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.”