Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · July 31, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 30

The Real Reason.

COMMENTING editorially upon the case of the Tennessee Adventist, fined for working on Sunday, and whose cause has been espoused by the National Religious Liberty Association, the Sigourney, Iowa, Review, of July 9, gives the following excellent analysis of the motives of those who demand, and enforce, such laws as that under which Mr. King is being persecuted:—

The witnesses who testified against Mr. King did not claim that any religious meeting was disturbed, or that they themselves were disturbed, or that any of their individual rights were invaded by his Sunday plowing, but only that their moral sense was shocked by his violation of the Sunday law, and this shock the court held to be a nuisance. These witnesses imagined that they possessed a moral sense, but we are rather inclined to doubt it. It is a very common human frailty to mistake bigotry and intolerance for moral sense. Men dearly love to make other men do as they do, especially in private individual matters that concern nobody else, and when they find men with minds of their own who will not obey their arbitrary commands, they are mad enough to tear them to pieces. The moral sense of the Chaldeans was terribly shocked when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar's golden image. It was not through any sympathy or fear that some terrible judgment would fall on these Hebrew children for their impiety, for they were eager to roast them in the fiery furnace. It was not any Christian love for Mr. King or any anxiety for the future salvation of his soul, that actuated his religious prosecutors in their efforts to stop him from plowing on Sunday. They were ready to rob him of his hard earned cash by heavy fines, and they would not hesitate to torture him to death, rather than allow him to exercise his right of conscience differently from what they had ordered.

After all, religious intolerance is nothing more than human egotism in its secondary or brother's-keeper stage. When a man conceives an idea in regard to diet, dress, rule of life or religious observances, he wants everybody else to see it just as he does. That they refuse to so see it or observe it, is to him a standing challenge to the wisdom of his position, which his conceit cannot brook, and he naturally craves the power to force them to observe something that he can't convince them of by facts, figures, or logic. After preaching his hobby till he gets a little following he organizes, and memorializes some political party to give him a law to enable him to force his theory on the rest of his brethren, in exchange for the votes of his organization, and if his organization amounts to anything as a political factor he usually gets the legislation he wants.

We don't believe that the religious people of Tennessee are any better than those of other States. We doubt if one in ten of them strictly observes the Sunday law they have forced on the statutes, and we have no idea that it was the salvation of men's souls they were thinking of when they clamored for the law under which they have been persecuting King. They observed, or pretended to observe, Sunday as a holy day, and imagined that they were doing a very praiseworthy act in so observing it, and expected the balance of mankind to look up to them with great reverence and respect on account of their piety. But the man who did not so observe the day, appeared to them as a standing challenge to their assumed superiority, and they wanted a law to punish him, not because they thought that God was unable to suitably punish the violators of his holy law, but because it hurt their human vanity to have their pretensions to great moral virtues disputed, and they wanted their revenge.

All these religious laws and prosecutions which have stained the history of the Church in all ages, come not from an earnest Christian endeavor to elevate mankind, but from the malicious disposition of the professor of religion to punish the man who dares to question the superior excellence of his professions. The religious Sunday observer of Tennessee could afford to be lenient with the squirrel hunters whose rifles could be heard popping in the timber on all hours of that holy day. He could easily ignore their violation of his Sunday law because the transgressors were low white trash whose influence cut no figure, but when a man making equally high religious professions with himself, whose life was just as pure and exemplary, who derived the authority for his position from the same sacred volume from which he derived his, and could defend his position with arguments and citations which could not be refuted, when such a man disputed the sanctity of his Sunday observance, a challenge was thrown out which he could not afford to ignore without serious sacrifice of his professed sanctity. It was not Mr. King's soul he cared to save from the consequences of his Sunday labor. It was Mr. King's influence that challenged the soundness of his theology, and set at naught his assumed religious superiority and authority, and aroused a combative malice, that would have lighted the fagots around the seventh-day observer, had the law of the State permitted it.