Religious Liberty Department by C. S. Longacre

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 16, 1915

Religious Liberty Department

By C. S. Longacre

C. S. LONGACRE N. Am. Div. Secretary

The Oklahoma Trial

DURING the first week in August four of our brethren in Hitchcock, Okla., were tried by the court at Watonga, Okla., on the charge that they had violated the Oklahoma Sunday laws. These brethren are engaged in mercantile business. The prosecuting attorney of the county indicted and prosecuted them. Although the State of Oklahoma grants an exemption to those who observe another day than Sunday, yet in the face of this exemption the court convicted our brethren even after it was demonstrated that they had conscientiously observed the seventh day as the Sabbath.

This clearly shows that our enemies do not intend to grant us any of the rights and immunities which are supposed to be guaranteed to us. They are determined to bring us under the control of their own religious prejudices when they get into office, no matter what rights and immunities the federal Constitution or State constitutions grant us.

It appears that the religious organizations which were assembled recently in Baltimore in national convention are determined to make good their threat concerning Seventh-day Adventists. The president of the Lord’s Day Alliance hammered the table with his fist and said, “The Seventh-day Adventists must be brought under subjection to the Sunday laws in this country.” A proposition was laid before the convention, and passed, that the exemption clauses for those who observed another day than Sunday should be stricken from the statute books. Over one hundred attempts have already been made in the various State legislatures this year to have this done, but the efforts in practically every case have ended in failure, the legislatures refusing to act favorably upon these bills. It now appears that they are going to have their own way in spite of this, and if they cannot get the legislatures to act, they will influence the officers of the law to violate the spirit of the law to secure conviction.

We have always held that our natural and God-given rights are not granted us by the government. The only office of the government is to protect us in the exercise of these rights. If it has the right to grant, it also has the right to withhold as it sees fit. But American principles of government recognize no such right. Yet plans have already been laid by powerful religious organizations which call themselves Protestant, not only to override our rights as citizens, but also to confiscate our property unless we submit to the requirements of the Sunday laws. The things that we used to preach and teach by faith as prophetic, are rapidly being written in history as fulfilled prophecies. Our enemies are working in disguise now, but soon we shall see them work openly, and the great conflict will be on. Then it will be too late to give to God and his work what may have been saved for the troublous times before us.

Let us not permit the enemy to deceive us on the point of covetousness and idolatry. God will have the first place in our hearts or none. Now is the time to put our trust in God and to place our means in his hands for use as he directs according to the needs of his cause. Whatever we possess when the time of trouble begins, will all fall into the hands of our enemies, and they will use it to aid their cause and secure weapons to be used against us. In that day your gold and silver “shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.”

The current issue of the Liberty Magazine, just off the press, contains an editorial article on the trial of our brethren in Oklahoma, and should be placed in the hands of every judge and lawyer and newspaper editor in every State in the Union. If our home missionary societies and Young People’s Missionary Volunteer Societies each would become responsible for a club of ten subscriptions, it would enable us to send Liberty to all these men for a whole year. The current issue also contains an invaluable article from the pen of Dr. P. T. Magan on the striking subject, “The Pope, the Powers, and Peace.” It will be a revelation to many Americans, and this issue will show in unmistakable terms the most striking fulfillment of God’s prophetic Word concerning the coming crisis and the impending conflict between truth and error, right and wrong, liberty and bondage, and Christ and Satan.

C. S. LONGACRE.