Are Sunday Laws Necessary?
By S.
This is a question which many good people are answering in the affirmative, for certain “reasons” which to them appear very satisfactory and conclusive. A brief survey of the grounds upon which their conclusion is based will be instructive. They say, for example, that without Sunday laws the Sabbath will be lost—that it will be driven out by the encroachments of corporate greed and the love of worldly gain and worldly pleasure. As a theory this idea might be given some degree of plausibility, but unfortunately for the theory its falsity is shown by the facts of actual experience. For there exists a Sabbath day, observed by many thousands in this country, and by some in all lands, which has no support at all in the civil law, but has existed through all the centuries of time without such support, and yet has never been lost and gives no sign of becoming lost to-day. Corporate greed and the love of worldly gain and worldly pleasure have had full opportunity to do their utmost against it, yet it has not succumbed to their attacks. And more than this, it has withstood also the opposition of popular custom and tradition, the opposition of the example and teaching of the religious world, and even the opposition of the civil law; yet it survives to-day, and is steadily making headway against all obstacles both passive and active. This Sabbath is the seventh day of the week, observed by the Seventh-day Adventists, Seventh-day Baptists, and others. Not many years ago there were but a few thousand observers of this Sabbath in the world; but to-day there are sixty thousand such in this country alone. Thus has the observance of an unpopular Sabbath spread and advanced amidst all those opposing influences which are said to necessitate laws for the preservation of Sunday, and against even greater obstacles interposed by religious people themselves. The conclusion is plain: if the Sabbath which encounters the most opposition can succeed against it all so as to be in no danger of getting lost, then certainly the Sabbath which has the least opposition cannot be in need of civil legislation to insure its continued existence, if it is the true Sabbath day. And if it be not the true Sabbath, then certainly there should be no civil law enforcing its observance. But it is said that Sunday laws are necessary to provide the laboring man with a day of rest; and by the use of certain facts and figures quite a plausible argument is constructed in support of this assertion. But here again experience lays a destroying hand upon the theory, for if the laboring man who desires to observe Sunday needs a law to secure him in this privilege, then surely the observer of the far less popular seventh day needs a law to secure him in like manner.392Yet the laboring men of the latter class are able to succeed in business without the aid of any law for Sabbath observance and have never thought of petitioning for such legislation. Actual present-day experience therefore demonstrates that Sunday laws are not needed either to preserve the Sabbath institution itself, or to enable the workingman to observe the day and continue to provide a living for himself and his family. It is demonstrated that such legislation is not needed for the protection of the minority; hence it certainly cannot be needed for the protection of the majority. For what reason then are Sunday laws necessary? If not for the reasons we have noticed, can there be any sound reason for them at all? We think not. s.