Untitled article by C. P. B.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · February 2, 1893

Facts vs. Ridicule.

By C. P. B.

A GOOD deal of ridicule has by the religious press been heaped upon the constitutional argument made at the recent hearing in Washington in favor of the repeal of the Sunday-closing proviso in the World's Fair bill; but why not answer the argument rather than ridicule it, if it can be answered?

It has been said that the Supreme Court decision of last February is a sufficient answer. But is it? Of course that decision gives color to the claim that the Supreme Court would sustain Sunday legislation; but it by no means proves that such legislation is constitutional in the sense of being in harmony with the purpose and intent of the Federal Constitution.

To understand the real purpose and intent of the Constitution, we must, as Chief Justice Waite remarked in 1878, go, not to recent decisions, but to the history of the times in which the Constitution was adopted, and give to the language of the Constitution the meaning that it had at that time. By this rule we shall find that the First Amendment was designed not only to make impossible the setting up of a State Church, but to forbid religious legislation, i. e., legislation upon religious questions.

The term “religion” is not defined in the Constitution, but the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted in 1776, furnishes us a definition as follows: “Religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction,” etc. This, then, is what the men who were instrumental in securing the adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution meant by “religion,” and in the light of this definition that amendment would mean just what it was intended to mean, if it read, “Congress shall make no law regarding the duty which we owe to our Creator, or the manner of discharging it.”

That this is the meaning of the First Amendment is evident also from the fact that the exact language of the Virginia Bill of Rights was used in the form of the amendment, proposed by three of the six States which proposed an amendment on this subject, namely, Virginia, North Carolina, and Rhode Island; while New Hampshire used equally unmistakable language, namely, “Congress shall make no law touching religion, or to infringe the rights of conscience.” It was evidently the purpose of the several States to utterly prohibit to Congress all legislation upon religious questions, and no number of decisions, even by the Supreme Court can make it otherwise. This is not so much a question of law as of fact.

That the First Amendment to the Constitution was designed not only to keep Church and State separate in the sense of preventing an ecclesiastical establishment, but in the sense also of separating religion and the State—making the Government absolutely secular, is evident not only from the facts cited, but also from other considerations. In fact this seems to have been the universal opinion until in recent years degenerate sons of noble fathers have sought to subvert the grand charter which they gave to their posterity. In 1797 Washington and his cabinet and the United States Senate declared in the treaty with Tripoli, “The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.” It is, perhaps, not saying too much to assert that President Washington and his advisers were in a position, at least as to point of time, to understand the intent of the Constitution better than the Supreme Court of to-day. They knew what it meant for they helped to make it and were familiar with the reasons for its adoption and for the adoption of the First Amendment. C. P. B.