Religious Liberty Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 21, 1908

Religious Liberty Notes

THE religious liberty department of the Central Union Conference is endeavoring to establish a newspaper correspondence bureau. This is a move in the right direction.

TWO more leaflets will soon be added to our regular series of “Religious Liberty Leaflets,” No. 13, “Alexander Campbell on Moral Societies,” and No. 14, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Protest against Sunday Legislation.”

From the North Michigan Conference News Sheet of April 21, 1908, we take the following suggestion: “When Luther was assailed by Satan, he threw an ink-bottle at him, and we can do the same by scattering the printed page.” The Religious Liberty literature will be a good kind of ink to throw just now.

Sunday evening, May 10, the secretary of the Religious Liberty Bureau gave an interesting and instructive stereopticon lecture on Religious Liberty to a full house at the Seventh-day Adventist Memorial church, Washington, D. C.

The Nashville Tennessean of May 3, 1908, contains a report of a recent Sabbath sermon on the subject of temperance, by Elder S. B. Horton, in which it is emphasized that it is the duty of the State to legislate against the liquor traffic.

One brother, sending in petitions from the State of Washington, says that his wife secured most of the signatures, and that “all but one she asked signed both petitions.” The letter and petitions were also accompanied with a prayer for God’s blessing on our work.

Prof. O. J. Graf, of Union College, College View, Neb., writes: “W. F. Crafts spoke in Lincoln about two weeks ago on ‘The March of Christ through the Centuries.’ Number present, 181; Adventists, 108; all others, 73. He seemed to know to whom he was speaking.”

The following extract from the Catholic Mirror of May 9, 1908, contains an appeal to all Catholics to participate in any movement for a better observance of Sunday: “We earnestly appeal to all Catholics, without distinction, not only to take no part in any movement tending toward a relaxation of the observance of the Sunday, but to use their influence and power as citizens to resist in the opposite direction.”

In a recent address on “Christian Education,” Dr. Jordan, the principal of the Sioux Falls (S. D.) College, took the position that state institutions of learning can not take the place of the church, and that as the state is altogether a worldly institution, it can not teach religion. Dr. Jordan further emphasized the fact that it is necessary for the church to have institutions where men and women can be educated for spreading the gospel.

Reference was made in this column a short time ago to the arrest of Henry E. Miles, of South Stukely, P. Q., an observer of the seventh-day Sabbath, for violation of the Sunday law in operating his mill. This case has recently come to trial, and the defendant was discharged under the exemption clause in the law in favor of one “who habitually and conscientiously observes the seventh day of the week as a Sabbath day, and actually abstains from work on that day.”

The following is the substance of a letter just received from a United States senator, concerning the Johnston Sunday bill for the District of Columbia, upon which the Senate Committee of the District of Columbia has rendered a favorable report: “I do not exactly agree with you that the bill to which you refer would be in violation of the Constitution. I do not think that a requirement of law that there shall be one day of rest establishes a religion of any kind, or prohibits its free exercise. A legal day of rest, one in seven, I think is necessary, and not necessarily as a day of worship, but as one of rest on which men can not be compelled to labor.”