p. 182 | Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · June 7, 1894

Why Exempt “Conscientious” Seventh-day Baptists, if Sunday Laws Are not Religious?

The provision in many of the Sunday laws, while adopted in order to do justly, apparently, by Sabbath-keepers, Jews and Christians, is wholly unmeaning and unjust if Sunday be only a “civil institution.” Why must one be conscientious in observing the Sabbath, before he can be permitted to do secular business on Sunday, except that the law assumes that he must be religious on one day or the other? If Sunday is only a dies non, merely a civil holiday or rest day, why put it on a basis unlike that of Thanksgiving day, Christmas, or the Fourth of July? These are dies non. This is as far as civil authority has any right to go; as far as civil rights demand that it shall go. How farcical to demand that before one be permitted to work on the Fourth of July he shall patriotically observe another day! No legislature would think of enacting a

law that everybody must feast upon Thanksgiving, except such as shall prove that they have gorged on turkey and cranberry sauce the day before. In short, no holiday except Sunday is hedged about with statutes forbidding labor or amusement on the part of those who have refrained from those on a previous day designated by the statute. It is unjust and unchristian to forbid Sabbath-keepers to labor on Sunday. It is a shameful relic of Middle Age bigotry and intolerance to punish them for so doing. But there is neither consistency, justice, nor religious freedom in exempting them because they have been “conscientious,” or religious in observing the day previous. Inconsistencies could scarcely be more glaring than those are which are presented in connection with Sunday legislation and its enforcement.—Evangel and Sabbath Outlook.