Religious Liberty Notes
By W. A. COLFORD
A GOVERNMENT bill has been introduced into the Belgium Chamber prohibiting Sunday labor. Belgium is a Roman Catholic country. A recent decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania declares that selling tobacco on Sunday does not constitute a breach of the peace. Honest labor and the sale of the necessaries of life on Sunday the court would doubtless consider “breaches of the peace.” The abuse of the franking privilege by the International Reform Bureau has been exposed by the New York Herald, New York Times, Pittsburg Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Record, Springfield (Mass.) Union, New Bedford Evening Standard, and other papers throughout the country. Commenting on the imprisonment of one of our brethren for disregarding a Sunday ordinance, the Christian Advocate, of Greensboro, N. C., makes the following inquiry: “If it is so easy to strap up a Seventh-day Adventist and put the law to him for violating the sabbath, why can not our authorities put the same law to these gentile sons of Belial, who keep neither Saturday nor Sunday? Why?” The offer of the mayor of Winston, N. C., to release from fine and imprisonment a Sabbath-keeper whom he had recently fined eighty dollars and sentenced to sixty days’ imprisonment for Sunday trading, upon condition of a promise not to further violate the Sunday ordinance, reminds us of the instruction which we have received that in the closing conflict the dignitaries of church and state would unite “to bribe, persuade, and compel all classes to honor the Sunday.” In this case, we are sorry to say, the offer was accepted. In a single short paragraph of a published address on “The Constitutional Basis of the American Sabbath,” delivered July 9 by Rev. R. C. Wylie, before the International Christian Endeavor Convention, at Baltimore, occur the following statements: “The sabbath is a civil institution, and for this reason is entitled to protection. The term sabbath means ‘cessation.’ There must be this cessation to the end that there may be religious activity.” This shows how much “civility” there is in the “civil sabbath” plea. Laws “protecting” Sunday are demanded “to the end that there may be religious activity.” Brother W. C. Presley, of Boston, Ga., writes as follows in regard to his prosecution recently for Sunday work: “I was arraigned before the court in Thorsville the fourteenth of June, for Sunday work, where I was tried and convicted. I had the blessed opportunity of presenting the truth to a class that probably would never have heard it in any other way. The court promised to relieve me of the fine if I would pay the cost of the court. I told the judge that I could not pay either. I could not pay the fine, neither could I pay the cost, which, in principle, amounted to the same. He said that I would have to go to jail for thirty days. I told him all right, I could not sacrifice a principle that was of eternal interest to me. But my friends would not listen to my going to jail; so, against my earnest and persistent protest, they made up the money and paid the cost, and so set me free.” How much real religious liberty some people believe in who boast of possessing it in unlimited quantities, is well illustrated in the following from the Statesville (N. C.) Landmark of Aug. 2, 1905: “The Landmark stands for the widest freedom in religious beliefs; but we have no patience with people who come along and try to overturn existing conditions like sabbath observance, which has been recognized for centuries. The Jews hold that the seventh day is the Sabbath; but the Jews have too much sense to defy the laws providing for the observance of the first day of the week. If one is allowed to practise any thing which he may hold as sanctioned by the Bible, the Mormons should not be disturbed in the practise of polygamy; they have as much right to disregard the law against plural marriages as the Seventh-day Adventist has to disregard the law which provides for the observance of the first day of the week as the sabbath.”