The German View of Sunday.
THE following is from the Stuttgart Correspondence Boston Daily Advertiser. It shows how Sunday has always been taught in the old country, i. e., merely as a day of recreation. It shows, too, that the German population will soon press this Sunday question as a political issue. “Secondly, the Germans in America complain that they are compelled by law to observe the Sunday in the American way. They have their doctrine of the day, which is that of the Christian Church in their native country; they land upon our shores, find a Church with a different doctrine, and find, moreover, that they are compelled to conform to it by the civil law. Assume, now, that the American doctrine is theologically the right one; that the Sunday is in one sense holy time; that its observance as such is matter of religious duty; and that those who fail at this point commit a sin, for which they will surely be punished hereafter; is it, however, the business of the State to enforce religious duties as such? Is it the business of the State to decide between different theological conceptions, espouse one as against another, and bring the strong arm of the law to its support? Here is a distinction between what is right as theological doctrine, and what is right as an exercise of civil authority, which our people too commonly overlook. So long as the Germans rest from labor, do not disturb the civil order, do nothing but what is innocent from the purely civil point of view, the commonwealth should hold them as citizens guiltless, however heretical otherwise their conception and use of the day may be. Undoubtedly our laws go further and contemplate the legal enforcement of the Sunday as a religious day. The German citizens cannot understand this. What they have been taught from youth up, and by Christian teachers, to regard as innocent before God and man, is found to be prohibited by law, and prohibited beyond dispute on theological grounds; and this, too, in the very country they have come to expecting to find a perfect separation of Church and State. They are offended, irritated,—quite without grounds, shall we say?” D. M. C.