A National Sabbath-Crusade.
Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts has started out to reform the world in general and the United States in particular in the matter of Sabbath observance. The reverend gentleman insists that all Sunday traffic and Sunday mails should cease, and demonstrates, to his own satisfaction at least, that all Sunday mails and Sunday traffic are an unnecessary and uncalled-for infraction of the fourth commandment. The reverend gentleman would have Sabbath observance enforced by law; would make the courts a whip of scorpions to drive the erring sons of men in at the strait gate and into the narrow path which he believes has its terminal in the New Jerusalem. He appears to have forgotten, if he ever knew, that the object for which this government was established by our historic sires, and for the maintenance of which millions in taxes are annually paid, was and is not to coerce men into heaven, but to enable them to live on earth in the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. Congress, to which the reverend gentleman fondly turns for his much-desired reform, has no right to stop a single wheel in the United States, nor has any State Legislature authority to prevent the running of as many Sunday trains as the various railway companies desire to send out. . . . The reverend gentleman says that Sunday trains are run for the express purpose of making money to fatten the bank account of millionaires. Doubtless they are not running simply to wear out the rolling stock. Trains are run on Sunday for the self-same reason that Rev. Mr. Crafts preaches on Sunday. There is a demand for Sunday trains and for Sunday preaching, and just so long as the demand exists, Sunday trains and Sunday sermons will be supplied, and in neither case will the earnings be refused. Rev. Mr. Crafts makes the same mistake as the Sunday reformers who have preceded him. The question of Sabbath observance is something with which no government should meddle. In that great day when the sheep will be separated from the goats, he will not find a single government on trial. The American Congress nor the English Parliament will be called to account collectively, but every man will have to toe the mark and make his own plea to the throne of grace. If it is wrong to travel or send letters on Sunday no man is compelled to do so because facilities are afforded any more than he need commit murder because it is possible for him to purchase a pistol or a dagger. The observance of the Sabbath as a day of rest is a beautiful custom, but its enforcement at the muzzle of a State or national law would be as obnoxious and uncalled for as the enforcement of church attendance or family prayers by the same means. The argument that federal or State interference is necessary to protect the overworked railway and postal employees loses much of its force in the face of the fact that the government pays postal clerks and mail carriers higher salaries than the same class of labor commands elsewhere, and that a very large proportion of train crews are paid by the trip, and can easily find Sunday substitutes if overworked, or if they have conscientious scruples against laboring on that day. The stoppage of Sunday mails would be an almost unbearable inconvenience; the stoppage of Sunday trains would practically paralyze many branches of industry. The Rev. Mr. Crafts and his co-workers are not reformers. They are striving to roll back the greatest reform that ever swept across the face of the civilized world; trying to rob man of religious liberty, and make him again the irresponsible creature of an autocratic religious hierarchy. —Dallas (Tex.) Daily News, May 22, 1889.