The Law of Work

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 5, 1908

THE advocates of laws requiring suspension of work on the first day of the week often make the claim that this is no interference with the rights of those who observe the seventh day of the week, as they are still permitted to devote that day to rest and worship, and are simply required to refrain from labor on the day set apart by the majority for religious purposes. A very good answer to this argument is made by Dr. W. F. Crafts, who is himself an earnest worker in behalf of Sunday laws. In the notes on the Sunday-school lesson for July 7, Dr. Crafts thus comments upon the fourth commandment:—

I see no escape without disloyalty to God and man and our own selves from the law that every whole man or woman should work regularly six days a week at some regular manual or mental task.

How strange that almost everybody thinks of the fourth commandment as requiring only a weekly suspension of its labor, as if it were a law of the one day, when it is on its face a law for the whole seven days of each week, requiring work on six as plainly as it requires rest on the other.

We invite Dr. Crafts to urge this argument the next time he appears before a legislative committee demanding such laws as would require observers of the seventh day to refrain from labor on another day also.