The Injustice of Sunday Laws
THE American Sabbath Union says, “There is rest more in employment than in idleness.” This is true, because true rest is only change of occupation. But the work of the Union is to secure a national law by which people shall be compelled to be idle on Sunday. Then, when they shall have secured the national power to compel all people to be idle, what employment shall the government give to these so that they may have a proper and profitable rest? The only proper employment for the Sabbath and the only kind contemplated by the Author of the Sabbath, is the worship, and holy thought and meditation upon the works, of God. But how is the government to furnish such employment as that? The simple and easy answer is, that it cannot furnish it at all. It is impossible for any but God to furnish it. Government is founded in consent. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. In this consent men surrender certain natural rights in order more fully to secure these and others. A just equivalent is justly expected in every such surrender, and without such an equivalent the surrender is void. Now, in the enactment of a Sunday law, the government obliges every man to surrender his right to engage in proper and profitable employment one-seventh part of his time. In other words, the government asks that men shall surrender one-seventh of their income, and for what equivalent? Idleness, and that only. But idleness is no equivalent whatever. Therefore, in the enactment of Sunday laws the government requires the citizen to surrender certain rights for which he receives no equivalent whatever. Consequently the surrender is in itself void, and for the government to insist upon and force the surrender is tyranny. Thus, clearly, it is demonstrated that the enactment of Sunday laws is directly subversive of the most sacred principles of American institutions,—the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, which consent must be met by an equivalent. It is not therefore in the least to be wondered at that the workers for a national Sunday law should declare the object of that movement to be “to change that feature in our fundamental law.” That is the logic of the movement. And then they will call it the “American Sabbath”! The fact is, it is un-American in its very inception.