Religious Liberty Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 28, 1910

Religious Liberty Notes

BROTHER E. G. FULTON, of Los Angeles, Cal., our most extensive café manager, in reporting his work through the Pacific Union Recorder, states that in his literature distribution to his customers, he is making a specialty of religious liberty tracts. This is a suggestion to other brethren engaged in similar lines of business.

Greater New York has now been added to the list of cities which are in the throes of a tremendous struggle for Sunday closing. Mayor Gaynor is showing himself equal to the most determined among the modern municipal heads fully bent on responding to the mad rage of the populace for this sort of disregard of true American governmental principles.

The Ministers’ Alliance of Kansas City has assured the barbers of the city, who are struggling for a “close” Sunday, that they may expect their “moral” support, passing resolutions to that effect, and ordering them sent, not only to the barbers, but to the mayor and the prosecuting attorney. This was after the last-named official had told the barbers that nothing could be done for them by his office.

The Colorado Conference paper, Echoes from the Field, has, in its issue of April 6, the following from Elder J. S. Wightman, religious liberty secretary of the Central Union Conference: “Now is the time to go to the public, and next winter will be the time to go to our representatives. On what we can do for the people now will depend what we can do with the legislators later on—to influence and prevail on them to make no law that will conflict with, or take away, the rights of conscience. A Testimony has said, ‘Be stanch to defend your religious liberty.’ Let us be stanch, then; and in this year of our Lord 1910 put our best endeavors to his service.”

The candidacy of J. B. Billard for mayor of Topeka, Kan., has intensely aroused the ministers of that city, as they declare him to be an atheist, since he has opposed Bible reading and religious exercises in the public schools. They allege that he will undertake to turn the city over to the “wets.” Rev. Dr. Charles M. Sheldon, the famous author of “In His Steps” and other similar books, is pastor of a church in Topeka and among the leaders of this ministerial fight. Declaring this to be a Christian country, he regards it as a “shame” to elect to the municipality’s chief office this “enemy to the teachings which are the very heart of our religious faith.”