Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · August 25, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 33

Call for a Council of Religion.

A CORRESPONDENT of the Washington Post expresses himself as to the Sunday question in Congress, and the country at large, in these spicy paragraphs:—

The recent senatorial phase of the irrepressible conflict over the Sunday question, while it did not solve the great problem of this country, is nevertheless valuable. It not only shows how incongruously a religious rider may be placed upon a purely worldly appropriation bill, but is fresh evidence of the fact that seldom may a discussion of the Sunday question be had without some of the participants showing a lamentable lack of preparation; without advocates of the several views indulging in a priori and exparte reasoning, if the bull may be pardoned; without issues of most diverse kind being interjected into the debate, and without somebody evincing a spirit which several centuries of Sunday observance should in all reason have eliminated from his personality.

Losing one's temper, garbling facts, making wide the borders of one's phylacteries, thanking God that one is not as other men are, or pandering for political or financial reasons to that indefinite, erratic, and evanescent figment known as common consciousness, will never settle the Sunday question. If men had always paid to public opinion that deference which it has always demanded, Brother John Jasper would be able to solidify his theory that “the sun do move” into a dogma; there would be no World's Fair, for the simple reason that Columbus would never have made the alleged discovery of America, the divine right of kings would never have been superseded by the divine right of the party boss in this free and glorious Republic, and a belief in the propriety of slaying supposititious witches would have extended, as has Sabbatarianism, its contemporary of the Mosaic dispensation, beyond the narrow confines of New England. There certainly ought to be some means evolved of solving the rather un-American situation enunciated in the question,—Shall 63,000,000 people be compelled to do any particular thing merely because 10,000,000 or even 20,000,000, say they think it ought to be done?

If I was not one of those 10,000,000 inclined to the orthodox observance of Sunday, perhaps I might not generalize in this way. But that I favor such an observance, though perhaps in no ironclad way, even with a backing of 9,999,999 others, is no more reason for interfering with the rights and opinions of the other 53,000,000 inhabitants of the United States than that I should endeavor to compel everybody else to smoke a pipe because nicotine has a pleasant effect upon my nerves. Nobody's opinion was ever really changed by an appeal to fear or prejudice; the stake, no matter by whom employed, was never a very efficacious means of increasing church membership, and threats of turning a man out of any particular denomination because he has been honest enough, for instance, to voice a change of sentiment from the standpoint that children unbaptized dying in infancy are eternally damned, will not cause him to lose faith in the church of God on earth, or in the final triumph of truth.

As in every other controversy, an appeal to human reason, which is of as divine origin as is the breath of life, is the only legitimate method of reaching some plane, where the great majority of the people, if not all ultimately, may unite in the observance of a rest day. The average American citizen who uses his mind is opposed to dogmatic dictation, whether it comes from the politician, from the pulpit, or from its auxiliary, the press. But the American citizen is prone to give respectful hearing to the advocacy of any opinion reasonably advanced, and is open to conviction to any theory, provided it be permeated with the enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Heretofore the Sunday question has been debated from the partisan standpoint, either for or against, and the dogma of those insisting upon the observance of the first day of the week in their own particular way has been equaled only by the dictum of those who have departed radically from what dogmatists insist has been the practice of the centuries. It may be there is a middle ground to which all might approach if the question were discussed in all its hygienic, economic, philosophic, and historic aspects. To be sure historic criticism is, from one point of view, rank heresy, but historic criticism, the purpose to know the truth in spite of the overturning of pet theories or even the public opinion of centuries, will continue until its results shall have become so orthodox that its advocates shall be in a position to denounce as heretics all persons not accepting its conclusions. Somehow or other, human nature has always shown such a flaw, and one of the easiest methods of ending a dispute is to call your opponents names.

Would it not be practicable to hold in this country a convention on the Sunday question? The Senate of the United States is hardly qualified to decide a religious controversy, and the country must look elsewhere for a settlement. Why not have a body representing every phase of thought on the subject, where the voice of labor, of the employer, of the pulpit, of the congregation, of the press, of the reading public, in fact, of every class in the community, may be heard on equal terms and with equal patience? The subjects to be discussed might include such questions as these: How did orthodoxy of the years '33–'50 regard the position of Jesus Christ and his apostles on the Sabbath question? Was the first Sunday legislation a partnership of organized Christianity with paganism? Why should American citizens of the nineteenth century be bound by politico-religious legislation of the seventeenth century in England? Has the insistence of an adherence to practices 200 years old resulted in a consistent observance of the spirit or the letter of Sunday laws by those who would have Government interfere in matters of conscience? Is there any material difference between the man of means drinking ice water on Sunday after his return from church and the iceman visiting a museum after he has delivered the ice?

Why would not the Parliament of Religions to be held at the World's Fair satisfy the Post’s correspondent? These questions will no doubt be determined there for the whole world, and Congress and Legislatures receive notice to legislate accordingly.