Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · March 8, 1894

Shame on Maryland.

The State of Maryland does not mean to be beaten by Tennessee. The latter commonwealth punished an otherwise inoffensive citizen for ploughing in his fields on Sunday, and Maryland has now inflicted the statutory pains and penalties on another farmer for husking corn on Sunday. We congratulate both of these Christian commonwealths on this signal vindication of the majesty of the law. To be sure, in both States thousands of saloons and brothels and gambling-houses are open every Sunday, making every one who enters them tenfold more a child of hell than he was before, but the courts have punished two Christian men for the much worse offenses of quietly ploughing in the fields or husking corn in a barn. Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum.

We wonder that the very stones do not cry out against such travesties of justice; that Christian men do not lift up their voices in protest against this wicked perversion of religion, this insult to the name of Christ. And, in particular, why do not Baptists, whose fathers stood against the world for soul liberty, make themselves heard when these relics of mediæval bigotry and persecuting intolerance are found in our free country? Sunday laws like those in Tennessee and Maryland are a disgrace to a Christian commonwealth in this nineteenth century, and should be repealed at the earliest possible moment.

The farmer who has been so sternly dealt with by the State of Maryland belongs to that denomination known as “Seventh-day Adventists.” He observes Saturday as a day of worship, and consequently is absolved by his conscience from the observance of Sunday. To him the first day of the week has no more sacredness than the third, and we are exhorted by the Apostle Paul to have due regard for such scruples on the part of our brethren. (Rom. 4:4–6.) He disturbed nobody by his labor, and he should not have been molested. We have known cases in which Seventh-day Christians deserved the penalties of the civil law. In one case, a Seventh-day Baptist kept a blacksmith shop just across the village street from a Baptist Church, and he always managed to have a job of hard pounding on his anvil at the hour of divine service in the Baptist Church. He deserved to be punished, not for working on Sunday, but for malicious disturbance of the worship of other Christians. He was persecuting those who differed from him in faith and practice. Had he been inoffensive about his work, and had the Baptists procured his prosecution for Sunday labor, they would have been persecuting him for a difference of faith and practice.

Baptists ought always to keep their minds clear on this one point: no laws relating to the observance of Sunday are valid that are founded on any belief as to

the sanctity of the day, or that seek to punish men for the offense of “Sabbath-breaking.” Such laws, where they exist, are a relic of the union of Church and State against which Baptists should set their faces as a flint. Sunday laws designed and adapted to secure for every man a day of rest, and to protect him from molestation if he choose to make it also a day of worship, are all that can be justified by the principles that Baptists maintain. We are bound by our centuries of protest against religious persecution to oppose everything else.

In this, and many other States, it is a bar against prosecution for Sunday labor, if the accused plead that he keeps any other day as “holy time.” This is the least recognition that the civil law can give to the rights of conscience. Maryland, Tennessee, and other States that still have persecuting Sunday laws on their statute books, cannot too soon follow the just and liberal example of New York. The Empire State has many defects, but we are proud to be citizens of a commonwealth where legal persecution of one denomination of Christians by others long ago ceased to be a possibility.—New York Examiner.