Sunday Rest and Worship
By A. DELOS WESTCOTT
worship, by families and nations, the more they are prospered.” Notice, it must be “kept as a day for rest and worship,” and by the Nation as well as by the family. Doctor Crafts and Joseph Cook agree with this sentiment precisely, and so do all the other leaders of the Sunday-law movement. Well, how must people use Sunday in order that it may be “kept as a day for rest and worship”? Mrs. Bateham answers:— “We want it for the purposes for which God designed it when he bade us keep it holy, not for frivolity and amusement, not for sleep and idleness, not for the Sunday newspaper with its demoralizing literature, but for reading which is elevating and improving, including the word of God, and for attendance upon church services; a practice which I believe does more than almost anything else to insure prosperity in this world and happiness in the next.” Dr. R. O. Post, at the Illinois State Sunday-law Convention for 1888, said:— “There is no kind of recreation that is proper or profitable on Sunday, outside of the home or the sanctuary.” Now let us put this argument together:— 1. The only kind of Sabbath observance that amounts to anything, or is at all satisfactory, is that which regards it “as a day for rest and worship.” “The experience of centuries shows that you will in vain endeavor to preserve Sunday as a day of rest, unless you preserve it as a day of worship,” says Joseph Cook. 2. Senator Blair’s Sunday-Rest bill “is in the main entirely satisfactory” to Mrs. Bateham and her co-laborers. 3. Therefore the spirit and intent of that bill must be to secure worship as well as rest, because that is the only kind of observance that is “entirely satisfactory.” And Mrs. Bateham tells us that this includes “reading which is elevating and improving, including the word of God,” and “attendance upon church services.” If they will work to secure an amendment of the Constitution, the purpose of which is to maintain religious instruction in the public schools, and then compel all the children in the land to attend these schools to receive this instruction, why should they not compel them to attend church on Sunday and receive a little more of that same kind of instruction? Most assuredly they will. And if they will compel the children, why not the parents? Don’t the parents need moral and religious instruction as much as the children? If it is the duty of the State to take in hand the moral and religious training of her children, as a matter of civil policy, to insure her own preservation and prosperity in this world, is it not as clearly her duty to see that the parents are cared for in this same respect? This is the way they will reason. Senator Blair’s Sunday bill is to “be construed, so far as possible,” in such a way as “to secure to the whole people . . . their mental and moral culture” on Sunday, and no one need tell us that they will not so construe it. But how are they going to attend to the moral culture of the people on Sunday unless the people go to the places provided for moral culture? To say that the spirit of the Blair Sunday bill enforces church attendance would be but a slight trespass upon language compared with the claim that the fourth commandment enjoins Sunday-keeping. The more they deny that the prime object of all Sunday laws is to help the church, and to get people to church, the more do they expose the hypocrisy of their scheme. They claim that the State has a right to enforce any measure which will insure prosperity in this world, and Mrs. Bateham says, “Attendance upon church services [is] a practice which I believe does more than almost anything else to insure prosperity in this world.” What, then, is to hinder them from compelling people to go to church as soon as they get the power in their hands? Just nothing at all. If they believe it is right to attend church, they will have no trouble to persuade themselves that everybody ought to be compelled by law to do it. Here is their principle:— “To compel men to do wrong, of course, is wrong; but to compel them to do right, is right.”—Pope Pelagius, A. D. 556. The Blair Sunday-Rest bill and religious amendment contain every feature necessary to the establishment of a religious despotism in these United States. That the leaders in this movement are determined to succeed, and to make these laws “effective” does not admit of a doubt. If the laws in some of the States are to be made any more “effective” than they have already been, may Heaven protect from the fiendish persecutions of their bigoted inquisitors the poor Christian souls who, with Elijah and Daniel, Christ and his apostles, the prophets of the old dispensation, and the martyrs of the new, dare to serve God according to the dictates of their own consciences, and refuse to bear allegiance in the realm of morals and religion to any king but God.