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Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · August 28, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 34

Fined Again.

R. M. KING, of Dyer County, Tennessee, whose case for Sunday-breaking has been appealed to the United States Court, was arrested the third time, on the nineteenth of last June, and brought before the justice court. Of this occasion, he writes:—

On the fifteenth of June, I went out in the morning, and hoed six rows of potatoes; worked just about an hour, and then went to hear the Methodist minister preach. There was a State warrant taken out for me the next day for Sabbath-breaking, and I was arrested on the nineteenth, and taken before Squire Barker, tried, found guilty, and fined $5 and costs, whole amount $6.90.

There was a man in the same neighborhood who cut wheat with a binder, on the same day, and worked the necessary hands to shock it, but there was no complaint made of his breaking the Sabbath. He was not a church member.

Of all the prosecutions for Sunday breaking in Dyer County, of which there has been a considerable number, in the past eighteen months, not one arrest has been made outside the number of those who are acknowledged conscientious Christian men, but who differ with the established religion of Tennessee, in that they read the fourth commandment, “The seventh-day is the Sabbath,” and those who enacted the religious laws of Tennessee read it “The First day is the Sabbath.” Those who acknowledge no allegiance to the divine command have so far been absolved from all allegiance to the human Sunday law. This clearly marks the spirit of persecution from which these prosecutions arise.