p. 287, para. 1 | Untitled article

Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · September 15, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 36

The Cottage Pulpit, of Nashville, Tenn., publishes this outspoken expression of noble and worthy feeling in reference to the fines and imprisonment suffered by Christian citizens of Tennessee under the State Sunday laws:—

In regard to the persecution of Seventh-day Adventists in Henry County, and elsewhere in this State, we have this further suggestion to offer: That if the intelligent Christians belonging to the communities where these men have been arrested would step forward and refund fines that an ignorant or prejudiced justice of the peace or judge has imposed upon them, under mistaken zeal for the maintenance of the State’s laws, they would honor Christ and his cause by it, and relieve themselves and the church in Tennessee of the appearance of complicity and approval of such disgraceful proceedings. Or, perhaps better still, to show the world that America’s boasted heritage of religious liberty is not all a sham and a fraud and a mockery here at the core of the Nation,—here in the old “Volunteer State,” as her citizens so proudly call her, because of her readiness to defend the national honor when the frontier was invaded, why not, you Christian men of honesty and intellect, exert your influence upon the governor of the State and have him remit the fines, as we presume he has the power to do, and thus cleanse the hands of our good commonwealth of the uncleanness, and her fair name of the stigma, of being thought a reviver of the old inquisitorial fires of persecution under color of law.