Untitled article by Alonzo T. Jones

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · October 23, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 42

Important.

By Alonzo T. Jones

The Pearl of Days, some weeks since, printed what it called “two important letters,” one of which was from Bishop Littlejohn, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the other from Patrick T. O’Hare, Rector of St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. Both letters were written to the Sunday Observance Association, of Kings County. Mr. O’Hare says:—

With regard to the observance of the Lord’s day, you will kindly permit me to give you an extract from the decrees of the Third Plenary Council, held by our bishops a few years ago, in Baltimore. The decree may be found under title 3, chapter 3, and No. 113. It is known as the decree on the “Liquor Traffic and the Observance of Sunday.” It reads as follows: “A Christian should carefully avoid not only what is positively evil, but what has even the appearance of evil, and more especially what commonly leads to it.”

This is an important letter, and it touches upon a matter that will prove in the end to be much more important than these so-called Protestant advocates now imagine. Mr. O’Hare simply does in this letter what all the Roman Catholics do when referring to Sunday observance; that is, for authority he quotes the decree of the Baltimore council. And when Protestants receive these letters as official communications, and put their indorsement upon them by printing them, and otherwise, they will find that one of these days they will be held as subject to the authority which they have thus recognized; and if they undertake to reject that authority they will be held strictly to answer for it. If Protestants would not be held amenable to the Roman Catholic Church, they must keep as far from any recognition of it as the east is from the west. It is true they do not intend this, but that matters not; the Roman Catholics intend it, and if the Protestants do not, the thing for them to do is to let this be known by keeping far from it. A. T. J.