The New Puritanism by CLAUDE E. HOLMES

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 8, 1916

The New Puritanism

By CLAUDE E. HOLMES

Some time ago the Washington Post published an article written especially for that paper, entitled “The New Puritanism.” The writer was Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catts, president of the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance. She says that the old, obsolete blue laws of Connecticut seem ridiculous to our modern notions. “We are beginning to suspect that it might be a good thing to modify Sabbath observance laws still further,” she declares, “and allow men who are penned up in offices and factories through the week to take their wives out into the pure air and sunshine on Sunday.”—Dec. 28, 1913.

We would do more than modify them, we would wipe them off the statute books altogether. They were inscribed there solely for the protection of the religious day, Sunday. “Sunday laws have come down from the earliest legislation in this country. . . . The legislation of those times bore marked evidence of the extreme religious sentiments then prevailing, and the Sunday laws were enacted not to protect men, but to protect a religious institution.”—New York Department of Labor Bulletin, September, 1910, p. 395. Were the churches true to their profession, they would repudiate such a union of church and state.

Mrs. Catts thinks the “blue law brand of Puritanism has gone forever.” We only wish it had. It is true, as she says, that the religion of the early American churches was “an extremely refined form of selfishness.” The Puritans’ “desire was freedom for themselves, never dreaming of extending an equal freedom to such as differed from them in religious opinion.”—“Religious Liberty,” Henry M. King, p. 72.

The Puritans are entitled to our admiration for their religious zeal. They not only studied the Scriptures, but they taught them to their children. They were faithful in attending church services. In all these things they are to be commended, because they did them as a result of their own convictions. But when they attempted to coerce others into the same way of living, the spirit of Christ was lost.

The undesirable spirit of Puritanism is far from being dead. There are many

professed Christians who, in the light of the twentieth century, are calling for the enforcement of intolerant religious laws that were in vogue in Puritan days. The same selfishness is manifested, the identical intolerance of those who differ from them in religious views.

In some quarters an overwhelming flood of circumstances has forced the advocates of Sunday laws to admit that the whole spirit that has been behind this propaganda is wrong. They have been obliged to admit their defeat. The New York Sabbath Committee is one of the oldest organizations in this country working for religious legislation. It has had a hand in practically all the religious legislation in this country during the last fifty years.

Now it confesses that “laws and customs which are imposed from without, which cease to be demanded by the judgment and the conscience of the masses of the people, will growingly become the cause of irritation and disturbance, like an ill-fitting shoe.”—“Report of the New York Sabbath Committee, 1912.” Not only irritation and disturbance have been caused by these unjust blue laws, but persecution and imprisonment. Men have been cast into jail, their families broken up, their property confiscated. This was not in the Dark Ages, not in colonial days, but since the founding of this Sabbath Committee.

The editor of the Continent (July 3, 1913), in commenting on this confession, says that the “present-day problem of Sabbath observance is not going to be met by pointing to restrictive acts on the statute book,—the acts so often sneered at as ‘blue laws,’—and rudely reviling the masses for not obeying their prohibitions. That is not after the manner or spirit of Christ.”

We have always believed and taught that trying to drive people into the fold of Christ is a disgrace to the driver, an injustice to those driven, and an imposition upon the Shepherd. It would fill the church with wolves in sheep’s clothing. There is no precedent for this action in any act of the Saviour.

In the summer of 1913 a Methodist camp meeting was held at Great Falls, near the city of Washington. During this meeting Vice President Marshall delivered an address. One truth he expressed is needed not alone by Methodists, but by other denominations as well:—

“I am for freedom. I want the right to sit in my narrow, upholstered Presbyterian pew and worship in my own narrow way, and I am willing to give you the whole outside world for your Methodist hallelujahs.”—Washington Herald, Sept. 1, 1913.

If all who feel inclined to worship God would do it, and refuse to coerce others into imitating them, one of the greatest problems would be solved.

No doubt the little respite in some places that has been forced upon Sunday-law champions by outraged public opinion has given ground for the belief that the Puritan spirit is declining. But a view of conditions over the whole country does not afford any ground for such a hope.

With the leaders of all the religious forces in America behind this movement, temporary setbacks will have little deterring influence. Protestant and Catholic bodies are committed to religious legislation, and they will have it at any cost to those opposing them or their purposes. An editorial in the Christian Observer of July 23, 1913, asserts that “the observance of the Sabbath lies at the foundation of society, and that the violation of this law will inevitably bring divine disfavor and penalty upon man.” The cry of the church today is, Work for society, save the masses, preserve the nation; and its first and its last thought in this regard seems to be the protection of the Christian sabbath by civil law.

CLAUDE E. HOLMES.