Untitled article by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · February 16, 1893

A Word to the General Assembly of Tennessee.

By Editor

[This earnest and well-timed appeal to the General Assembly of Tennessee is reprinted from the Sabbath Recorder, where it is credited to the Cottage Pulpit, of Nashville, Tenn.]

THE legislature of Tennessee will be in session here in our beautiful capitol building when this number of the Cottage Pulpit reaches some of our more distant readers. As a whole month will intervene before we shall have another chance to speak to these honored representatives of the people of our State, and they will then be far along in their ninety-day's biennial session, we want to ask a hearing of their clemency upon subjects in which, as a citizen, as a man, and as a servant of God, we feel a profound interest.

There are two questions, of a religious or semi-religious aspect, both of them, that ought to have attention before this august assembly of a State's legislators. One is the lifting of Tennessee's sovereign arm as an incorporated part of the American Nation in a withering rebuke of the Russian persecution of the Jews; and this can be done through proper instruction of our senators and request of our representatives in Congress. This is all we shall say now upon this question. The companion of this in our estimation, only as much more pressing as it is nearer home—at our own door, in fact—is the Sabbath question, as it will, or ought to, come before them in the case of the wicked persecution of certain harmless and useful men, women and children, citizens of Tennessee, resident in the county of Henry. It will be for this legislature and those honorable, and we hope God-fearing men, whom the favor and confidence of their fellow-citizens have sent here to legislate for the commonwealth, to say, whether they endorse that Henry County inquisition or not. It will be for them to purge the State's escutcheon of the stain that these wicked persecutors of good citizens under a form of law have brought upon it, or, by failing to do so, deepen the spot of infamy until honest men traveling abroad will be ashamed to own that they belong to Tennessee.

It is to be hoped that there will not be wanting a wise and patriotic statesman in each branch of our legislature who will make it his especial care to prepare and bring forward a proper bill, providing for the repeal of all laws or parts of laws upon our statute-book under color of which any man's religious belief can be made the occasion of his arrest, fine, or imprisonment, to gratify the religious prejudices and petty spite of that majority in a neighborhood or county to whom the said religious belief may chance to be objectionable. You owe it, gentlemen of the Tennessee General Assembly—let us say it in all earnestness and respect—you owe it to the Constitution of your country, and to the spirit of its framers, to the genius of this enlightened age, and to your solemn oaths as now entrusted with the power to make, amend, or annul the laws of your State (that, under the instrument of its own organic being, is required to be in accord with and under obedience to our great national Constitution, which as you all well know forbids the passage of any law that interferes with freedom of conscience in the practice of a man's religion), you owe it to the truth of God and the voice of the very consciences that he has put within you, to do the thing suggested, and to act promptly and without delay. The eyes of men of correct principles, of proper sense of justice under American law, are upon you, to see what you are going to do about the business; for it is a matter in which every real Christian, every true patriot, every man in fact whose heart has not, from long disuse of its better instincts, dwindled down to the dimensions of a peanut, is interested; for it is a matter patent to everybody that, under color of statutory law in Tennessee men have been, and are now being, deprived of their liberty because in the exercise of their religious convictions, they, after keeping the seventh day holy according to the law of God, work on the first day of the week, commonly called Sunday, without disturbing others, either individuals or congregations, in their Sunday-rest or their worship on that day.

You well know, gentlemen of the Legislature, that such a use of the law protecting worshiping assemblies as that made of it in these cases was never contemplated by its framers, or if by any jesuitical design so intended to be used against the few but good Christian people of the country who were then known as keepers of the seventh day Sabbath, the statute was void from the beginning as plainly at variance with the spirit and letter of the amendment to the Constitution of the United States on the subject of religious liberty.

Allow us to suggest that, inasmuch as malicious persecution is, if we mistake not, and ought to be, a felony in any and every properly regulated legal system, you would do yourselves honor if you would frame a statute fully covering the case of those wicked religious bigots of Henry County, who are said to boast that they will drive the keepers of the seventh-day Sabbath out of the country. If you could by some legal enactment stop the mouths of all such disturbers of the peace of their inoffensive neighbors who are in every respect better than their persecutors, but are greatly in the minority, you would be doing a good thing. Is not a man's religious liberty dear to him; yea, as dear as his life? If, then, a threat against a man's life is a punishable offense, should not the penal code take some cognizance of the other? If under ordinary circumstances a malicious persecutor is the meanest creature that a court of justice is ever called to deal with and punish, how the color of such a character darkens into midnight hues, when from the private individual it becomes, of course only in the name, a Methodist or Baptist, Presbyterian or Christian, or a combination of such, who, to show his zeal for his sect, puts his weak and unpopular brother of another sect “in durance vile,” simply because he hates him, and has the legal machinery of his country under his spiteful fingers, and can do it! Can't you stop this thing, gentlemen of the legislature? Surely it is the province of the true gentleman wherever he is placed to be the protector of the weak, and the righter of the wronged.