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Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York City · June 11, 1896

NO COMPROMISE WITH THE SALOON.

At a convention of the Seventh-day Baptist churches of West Virginia, held May 20–24, at Greenbriar, that State, the following resolutions relating to Sunday laws were passed, together with others condemning the rum traffic and advocating prohibition:—

Resolved, That we believe that the Sabbath is a divine institution, the appointment of the seventh day of the week to be kept holy unto the Lord; and that it is not the province of the civil law to determine or enforce its observance.

Resolved, That we ask the Legislatures of States to repeal existing Sunday laws, because of the encroachment thereby of the State upon matters which men owe alone to God; and because the simulation of the Sabbath imposes a hindrance to the discernment and observance of the day we are commanded of God to keep holy.

Resolved, That we esteem the blessings of the Sabbath to be a great good, but that the compulsory idleness which the attempted supervision of civil law presumes to interpose is subversive of that good; that it gives, and only can give, a holiday instead of a holy day; and that the enforced idleness intended for aid of the church is, instead of that, a corralling of the world in the interests of the saloons.

Resolved, That we will have nothing to do with laws for prohibition of the liquor traffic one day in seven, because it is such a compromise as implies a tacit admission for it to continue the other six days; because it diverts from efforts for entire prohibition, and that it absorbs largely the efforts in behalf of prohibition, engaging its friends in a very much harder task than it would be to maintain entire prohibition.

These resolutions were printed in the Pittsburg Press, of May 27, which added the pertinent comment that “if a compulsory holiday operates in favor of the saloon, rather than against it, it behooves Prohibitionists to modify their action respecting the Sunday laws.”