The Sunday Question Again.
THE meetings held in this city last Sunday in the interest of the Sunday Union and addressed by Mr. Crafts, its field secretary, were not largely attended nor very enthusiastic. We attended the one held at the Methodist Church and listened to the rambling discourse, and consider that Mr. Crafts made not a single strong argument for any proposition he made. His remarks regarding the AMERICAN SENTINEL, of Oakland, were, to say the least, out of place and not in good taste. He seems to think he can dodge this issue by throwing upon the opposition the opprobrious epithet of “Seventh-day Adventists.” The statement that the opposition to the movement to make Sunday a national Sabbath by legislative enactments is almost wholly confined to the small sect called Seventh-day Adventists, and that it is a question of Saturday or Sunday Sabbath is false and dishonest in origin and purpose. Millions of American citizens who are not interested in this theological contention about which is the “authorized” Sabbath, are deeply and earnestly interested in preserving this Nation a nestor of religious toleration and liberty—the principle that makes the American flag the protector of every one in this country in the exercise of his own judgment in matters of ecclesiastical belief and religious observances, and “in worshiping God,” or in not worshiping anything, “under his own vine and fig tree, according to the dictates of his own conscience,” and none dare “make him afraid.” Mr. Crafts is anxious to shut up all kinds of business on Sunday so that all may have a fair and even start on Monday morning at taking in the earnings of the “poor laborers.” Will Mr. Crafts and his brother priests lay off on Sunday and not take up the usual collection until Monday to give other business men a chance? This matter of spending money, by laborers, in saloons on Sunday can be readily changed in one of two ways. First, abolishing the holiday-Sunday altogether as a day of idleness and the very hot-bed of crime and harvest-day of the “Devil,” and treating all days alike and treating men in the same manner on all days; or second, employers making Monday pay-day instead of Saturday. Either of these will work like a charm. How would it do for Mr. Crafts to take some of his own medicine? He argues that there is a natural as well as a moral reason for keeping one day in seven as a day of rest, and yet he declares that he has for some time been violating this law of nature by traveling about the country so that he spends each and every Sunday in a different city. He travels or speaks every day of the seven, and he might set a good example as well as be consistent by confining his “work” for this cause to the six working days of the week, and resting on Sunday in compliance with “the laws of nature, of morality, and of God,” which he says, consecrate it to REST.—The Silver Gate (San Diego), August 31.