Should Sunday Aviation Be Prohibited by Law?
By C. M. S.
SINCE the declaration of the executive that the aviators at Baltimore must not fly on Sunday, many have been wondering how far the state may rightfully go in enforcing an ordinance of the church. The keeping of a sabbath is an ordinance of the church, an act of religion, an act of worship; and Americans have a right to ask whether the state is justly empowered to enforce religion, or worship, upon the people. The constitution of the State—and if we wish to go further, the Constitution of the United States—gives us ample warrant for questioning the right of any official to enforce religion. The American basis of government is this: The complete separation of the functions of religion and civil law, not in disparagement of religion, not in defiance to the state, but because the lessons of history demonstrate the hollow mockery and the inhuman cruelty of religion enforced by law. In speaking of “religion enforced by law,” we speak necessarily in an accommodated sense; for there is no such thing, in reality, as enforcing religion by law. All that is possible is to enforce the outward forms, the ceremonies, the rituals, the hollow shell, with the living substance gone. Religion is an affair of the heart and soul, and is not subject to the caprice of legislation. The problem which America was set to demonstrate to the world was that a nation could exist and prosper, with religion free from governmental control. For more than a century and a quarter, America has gone on demonstrating her solution of that problem. Never was the church so free, and never was a nation so prosperous. With the problem solved, are we ready to take up the thankless burdens of a state-church régime, to put on again the outgrown garments which even Latin Europe is summoning courage to cast aside? It is a principle of American jurisprudence that the powers not delegated to the government are retained by the people. Who can say that the people have ever delegated to the legislature, the governor, or the president the authority to take from them one seventh of their time, and dedicate it to religion? It is true that man is required by his Maker to keep the Sabbath; but nowhere in the divine Book is there a record that God has ever commissioned any civil official to enforce that requirement. Religion has to do with the personal relations between man and his God. When the state steps in between the two, it has presumed to act without warrant either of divine law or human justice. When the state attempts to compel the individual to be religious, it strikes an awful blow at the most vital principle of true religion. Acceptable worship must be the voluntary, spontaneous outflow of the human heart. Law can no more compel true worship than it can compel the flowers to take on colors, or the sun to give us warmth. If the state can constitutionally compel us to keep Sabbath, what religious ceremony or ordinance is there which it can not enforce upon us? We have a right to take “alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.” The same government which can say that the people must keep Sabbath can say to us that we must also be baptized, and prescribe which manner of baptism is legal, and which illegal. Once open the door to the enforcement of any religious ceremony, and we have no guaranty of immunity from that system of state-churchism that invades the rights of every individual, and dictates the religion of all. This country had enough of that during its colonial period; and the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States was designed forever to estop the interference of the government in the religion of the people. The Old World is getting enough of that régime, and the people are rising in their might to overthrow the system. Unnecessary to the Interests of Religion
No religious system has ever helped any people when the tenets of that system were made compulsory. An attempt to force belief can only result in falsehood and hypocrisy on the one hand and martyrdom on the other; and it is invariably and necessarily the best and most substantial element in the community that accepts martyrdom. The unprincipled, the weak and vacillating, will profess anything to escape punishment. Those who have true nobility of character, whose religion is truly an affair of the heart, will submit to torture and death rather than yield their principles, and profess to believe what they do not believe. It is not difficult to see, therefore, that whenever a nation or a state has enforced religious practices under pains and penalties, it has become a persecutor of its best citizens. When it has taken the lives of such, it has robbed itself of the best it had, and thereby increased its proportion of the morally weak and untrue and vicious. He who believes in his soul that Sunday is the Sabbath of Jehovah should keep it; but if the state were to enforce everything a man ought to do in the matter of religion, we would be right back again in the days of Colonial New England, in the days of the Covenanters, in the days of medieval Rome, when the state and the church were one, and when the anathema of the church was equivalent to a death warrant from the state. If the Baltimore aviators believe that Sunday is the Sabbath, and desire to keep it, there is no power on earth that can or would prevent their doing so. If they have no such belief, or if, having it, they still do not care to worship or rest upon the day, it is still no legitimate affair of the state. The individual must answer to God for the way he treats the Sabbath. The interference of the state only complicates, and never can help, matters. The state may compel a balloon to rest on Sunday; but it never can compel the balloonist to believe in the institution or keep it in the spirit of true obedience, if he does not have it in his heart. And if he does have it in his heart, there is no more need of a human law to compel him to keep it than there is of a law to compel a child to love its mother. Must Airmen Alone Keep Sunday?
A question must arise in the minds of every thinking individual when he contemplates the governor’s prohibition of the navigation of the aerial sea on Sunday, and that is: Why are the airmen alone singled out for distinction and compulsion in this matter? Is it more sinful, or criminal, to navigate the air on Sunday than to navigate the water? Does the governor’s prohibition extend also to marine vessels, and place a ban upon their sailing from the ports of Maryland on Sunday? Is it more criminal to sail through the air on Sunday than to drive a screaming locomotive with its train of cars, or a tooting automobile with its load of pleasure-seekers, over the land of the State? If these are permitted to operate, by what principle of justice or equity are the airmen singled out, and compelled to lie quietly in their hangars on Sunday? It looks to a lay member like a most striking example of class legislation, or of class application of an obsolete and worse than useless law. That system of so-called religion which, knowing its own weakness and worthlessness, flees to the state for that protection and power which it has no reason to expect from God, declares itself, in the very asking, unworthy of the favor which it demands.15 We are not attacking law; but we do declare it possible for the legislative branch of the government to step outside its legitimate jurisdiction, and in so doing to become a trespasser upon the rights of both God and man. It does this whenever it enters the realm of religion. The Sabbath is a divine institution, and all should keep it; but the law of Jehovah is sufficient. If men will not keep it on that basis, they can not truly keep it on any other basis, and human laws to enforce it are an insult to both God and man. The temporal affairs of men are the legitimate concerns of government. The spiritual affairs of men are between them and God, and the state should leave them there. Said our Saviour: “Render to Cæsar [government] the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Ulysses S. Grant was only reiterating this command of our Lord’s when he said: “Keep the church and the state forever separate.” To neither of those statements do we give heed when we permit the state to dictate a single religious requirement.