Barbers Testing a Sunday Law
By Editor
THREE barbers in South Portland, Oregon, who are said to observe Saturday, the seventh day of the week, for the Sabbath, have been arrested for keeping their shop open on Sunday. The Barbers’ Union is seeking to make a test case. Regardless of the question of the seventh day, or Saturday, being the only Bible Sabbath, simple justice ought to show fair-minded people that if an individual conscientiously observes one day of the week, he ought to be permitted to labor on the other days if he so desires. Indeed, when it comes to the inalienable rights of the individual, if he cannot perform honest labor on any day that he may choose, we are confronted with a species of despotism that our forefathers opposed when they announced the great principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. There is something about perverse humanity that causes it to determine to prescribe to others just what they shall do, and this is particularly observable in the direction of the growing disposition to enforce the observance of Sunday. If a man desires to rest on Sunday, it is his privilege. But when religious sentiment, no matter under what guise it may come, undertakes to compel a man to rest on that day, the realm of tyranny has been entered, and despotic persecutions will follow. We have been pointing out through these columns, for more than a third of a century, that we would yet have a religious despotism in this country, and that when it came, the Sunday Sabbath would be the central ground upon which all the factions would meet in enforcing their ecclesiastical decrees. Many people have laughed at this; but the evidence is growing on every hand that the time is drawing on rapidly when church forces will combine to secure the enactment and the enforcement of Sunday laws in city, state, and nation. There is a persistent activity in this direction. In many instances, the church power works through labor organizations; and thus it is made to appear that labor, and not the church, is seeking to secure the Sunday rest. But back of it all is the church sentiment in favor of Sunday. Standing opposed to all these Sunday measures is the fact, so clearly presented in the Bible, that the seventh day, or Saturday, and not Sunday, is the Sabbath. And it is reasonable to conclude that we may not count on having God with us in attempting to enforce upon mankind the observance of a day that He has not sanctioned.