p. 7, para. 1 | Untitled article

Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · January 7, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 1

Rev. W. E. Parsons, chairman of the Board of Visitors to the penal and reformatory institutions of Washington, D. C., according to the Washington Post, has expressed himself thus:—

This Congress ought to appoint a commission to oversee all of our correctional and penal institutions. Reforms are badly needed in our police court. Men taken into custody Saturday are confined nearly forty-eight hours with little or nothing to eat, sweltering in the close stench of the police court cells, before they have a hearing. A brief session of court Sunday morning to dispose of unquestioned cases would be in the interests of humanity.

While one set of clergymen and supposed philanthropists are striving to the utmost of their capacity to have all secular occupations, on Sunday done away with by legal enactment, here is another which proposes that the courts shall sit and try cases on Sunday. At first this seems a serious contradiction; but things are not always what they seem, for when this is a Christian Nation, on the lines laid out by the National Reformers, the courts will all be ecclesiastical courts, and then why may they not, according to the tenets of a legal religion, sit for the trial of cases on Sunday at their discretion?