Religious Liberty Notes
By K. C. RUSSELL.
IN Mansfield, Ohio, the Ministerial Association is about to inaugurate a Sunday-closing crusade. They seem to be especially directing their efforts against the running of the merry-go-round on Sunday. A brother in Georgia was recently convicted and fined for Sunday labor, but the court offered to exempt him from the fine providing he would pay the costs, which he rightly refused to do; but some of the citizens, against his protest, paid the costs, and then he was released. The nineteenth annual meeting of the20Sabbath Association of Illinois was held at the First Baptist church in Chicago on May 19. “The meeting was attended by ministers of many denominations, many of whom delivered short addresses.” “The association decided to send a letter to President Roosevelt requesting him to stop the delivery of the mails on Sunday, and also to discontinue paying the men employed on the Panama Canal on Sundays.” A dispatch from St. Petersburg, Russia, under date of July 8, reported that “the printers who struck Sunday, April 23, have won a victory in their demand for the observance of Sundays and holidays by abstention from work, only the Novoe Vremya appearing this morning.” “The observance of Sundays by abstention from work” is a very apt phrase. It is often argued by Sunday enforcement champions that compelling people to refrain from work on Sunday is not compelling them to observe the day, but this is not so. Rev. J. B. J. Rhodes, of Cranford, N. J., has announced “a startling series of sermons which he intends to deliver in St. Paul’s M. E. church” in that place. “These sermons will be about the desecration of the Sabbath day in Cranford, and of the evils which menace the community. Open stores which get the pennies given children for Sunday-school, the playing of golf on Sunday, and the keeping of the small boys away from Sunday-school to act as caddies, and Sunday amusements will all receive treatment, and be exposed by the preacher.” The Mansfield (Ohio) News of June 27, seems to consider the running of a merry-go-round on Sunday no worse than the running of street-cars, automobiles, etc. This same paper comments on the Sunday question as follows: “We’ll never all be able to get together on the subject of Sunday observance. The Sunday of some very good people begins Saturday evening, and the daylight hours of Sunday are most rigidly and decorously observed—but the clothes for Monday’s wash go to soak every Sunday night. Is the whizzling automobile carrying Sunday pleasure riders any more sanctified than the plebeian street-car that carries the masses of the people, or any less reprehensible than the merry-go-round in which the poor man’s children may go whirling on Sunday? What are the comparative degrees of the whirling? Is the ‘chug! chug!’ of the auto any less fretful to the ear than the rolling of the carousal?”