RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 12, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 28.

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION.

[From the Amory (Mississippi) Argus of June 2, 1899.]

A SHORT time since Elder R. S. Owen, an upright gentleman and a Seventh-day Adventist residing near Hatley, was arrested on the charge of violating the law forbidding labor on Sunday. Mr. Owen says he was taking a little exercise in his garden after a Sabbath rest the day before. Of course he considers Saturday the Sabbath. Bond was given for his appearance at the city hall in Amory, July 19.

Commenting upon a similar arrest in Georgia very recently, the Gainesville Eagle observes:—

The hauling of these Adventists before the grand juries is religious persecution pure and simple. It is always instigated by some fellow who is utterly devoid of religion himself—some hypocrite who does not care a rap for the sanctity of the sabbath. If this were not true, why is it that none but Adventists are ever prosecuted for working on Sunday? And these sensitive, tender-hearted bigots who are so utterly outraged by seeing an Adventist plowing on Sunday in his field four hundred yards from the road—why is it that they can go on Sunday and sit for hours and spit tobacco juice and listen to smutty stories, in front of a livery stable, while the establishment is in full blast, breaking the sabbath by hiring the tired and protesting dumb brutes to sabbath-breaking picnickers?

Can any one tell why a man who believes the first day of the week is the sabbath, is not prosecuted for desecrating that day? Is it not as sinful to break the sabbath, knowing you are breaking it, as it is to break it, believing you are not breaking it? Is it not as sinful to break the sabbath for pay as it is to break it for conscience? The idea of the religious informer and the grand juror is that you may sin, but mustn't believe you are doing right.

And right here is where the unspeakable infamy of the thing comes in—this censorship over conscience, participated in by the law and the religious spy. And here is where the rudimentary fang shows at its best, and here you see on it the blood-mark of the rack and the thumbscrew, those precious implements that were so effectual in persuading the minority to conform their belief to that of the majority.