The Law-Protected Sunday Institution

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 18, 1906

The Law-Protected Sunday Institution

Referring to the hearings before the legislative committee of the Massachusetts General Court for the amendment of the present Sunday law, the Congregationalist of September 29, says:—

With both Canada and France stiffening rather than relaxing legislation governing Sunday labor, it is no time for Massachusetts to be in a less conservative mood. Latest reports from Paris tell of voluntary compliance with the new Sunday rest law by six leading railway companies, who agree within eighteen months to give fifty-two days a year off to their joint staff of 280,000 men, a day of rest once a week being conceded, on Sunday when possible.

Time was when America was regarded as an example to the world in the matter of religious liberty and the proper relation between church and state. It seems like a long step backward when America looks to Catholic France or to our nearer neighbor, so strongly Catholic, as a mentor in such matters. It would be but natural that France, the child of the papacy, should do what she could to protect the papacy’s most conspicuous institution; and Canada, with her very large Catholic constituency, might be expected to do likewise; but for the editor of a great Protestant religious paper to step into line in the same work is, to say the least, an incongruity and a denial of Protestant principles. But all over the world we see a rapid growth in the idea of the law-protected Sunday institution.