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Note and Comment

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Nov 10, 1904

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 81, No. 45.

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Note and Comment

By L. A. S.

A REPORT made at the late Episcopal convention by a commission on capital and labor, in which were Bishop Potter and ex-Mayor Seth Low, of New York City, and Jacob A. Riis, draws a parallel between the labor trust which seeks to dictate terms to those who would enjoy the right to work, and the religious trust which formerly dictated to the people in religious matters, and would now, in some places, compel all men to accept Sunday as the Christian sabbath, and pay homage to this religious institution, under penalty of forfeiture of their civil rights. The report says:—
The question of the closed shop is like the question of the closed State. Men whose Puritan ancestors strove to maintain a State whose privileges should belong only to members of the church, ought to be able to understand the struggle of their brethren to maintain a shop in which no man shall serve except a member of the union. They may not agree with these brethren, but they ought to appreciate their self-sacrifice. The laborer has learned from the capitalist to despise order and break law. He has learned from the churchman to pursue the dissenter with menace and violence. The recent tragedies in Colorado do not follow at a far distance the massacres which in the sixteenth century ensued upon the withdrawal of Holland from the ecclesiastical union.
This is a recognition of the truth that the same spirit actuates men in the invasion of the rights of others, both in secular and in religious matters. The same spirit that is now stirring up strife in the industrial world is ready to cause trouble in the religious realm, and will surely do so, in fulfilment of inspired prophecy. Out of the existing strife in civil and in religious affairs will come, ere long, the decision that no man may buy or sell save he that has the mark of the “beast”—the ecclesiastical power described in Revelation 13. To that end all things are now tending. L. A. S.