Sunday in Oppressive Legislation
By J. O. Corliss
The history of civil legislation in behalf of Sunday observance is of deep interest, because it opens to candid minds the great injustice of all such acts to individual conscience. Furthermore, it reveals the subtle methods by which dominating church sentiment has succeeded in harnessing the civil power to its car of creeds, and thereby bringing oppression to sincere believers in Bible doctrines. While traces of Sunday legislation are found in most centuries of the Christian era, laws of that nature did not originate in Christianity, but with paganism. Genuine Christianity has never needed nor desired the arm of civil power to advance its interests, since the “arm of the Lord” has from the first been pledged to the support of His offspring, through any and every phase of its history. For this reason the remark of Benjamin Franklin was to the point when he said: “When religion is good, it will take care of itself; when it is not able to take care of itself, and God does not see fit to take care of it, so that it has to appeal to the civil power for support, it is evidence to my mind that its cause is a bad one.” Sunday keeping could not well have God’s support, being contrary to His expressed will regarding the weekly rest day. His established day of rest was given for the definite purpose of keeping His creative power prominent before the world, while its rival, Sunday rest, was introduced in honor of sun-worship. To uphold an institution established for that purpose would be to dethrone Himself as sovereign of the universe. This being true, the civil power that attempts to enforce such an institution by legislative enactment, goes as far as its power permits, in the same direction, because it enforces the observance of a pagan festival upon those who ought to have in mind the weekly memorial of God’s creative power. In his “Critical History of Sunday Legislation,” Dr. A. H. Lewis says: “The first Sunday legislation was the product of that pagan conception, so fully developed by the Romans, which made religion a department of the state. This was diametrically opposed to the genius of New Testament Christianity. . . . The emperor Constantine, while still a heathen—if indeed he was ever otherwise—issued the first Sunday edict by virtue of his power as Pontifex Maximus in all matters of religion, especially in the appointment of sacred days. This law was pagan in every particular.” The early church, it seems, in addition to Sabbath observance, rather favored the recognition of Sunday as a resurrection festival, and so in time gradually combined that idea with the pagan conception, as the result of receiving into fellowship those who held in some measure pagan views of sun-worship. Later, as papal rites were being evolved from pagan observances, and the Papacy itself assumed civil jurisdiction, religious regard was demanded for the day, in honor of Christ’s resurrection. Accordingly the council of Laodicea, in A.D. 364, decreed Sunday to be the Lord’s day, and enjoined its observance, at the same time forbidding members of the church to rest on the “Sabbath like Jews.” About the middle of the fifth century, says Heylyn, in his “History of the Sabbath,” part 2, chapter 4, section 8, a law was made by Leo, then pope of Rome, that holy orders were to be conferred on no day but Sunday. So to be in line with the church, the emperor Leo, in A.D. 469, issued a decree that if any one in the empire should ignore Sunday observance, and engage in worldly business or pleasure on that day, he should be punished by loss of his commission if a military man, or by the confiscation of estate and goods if a common citizen. This persistent effort to destroy the Sabbath, and to lift Sunday into recognition as a holy day, was followed by more stringent legislation. In volume 8 of his “Ecclesiastical History,” Fleury says that Pope Gregory, near the close of the sixth century, sent out an epistle condemning all who advocated the observance of Sabbath in conjunction with Sunday, calling them “preachers of antichrist.” So far, indeed, was this spirit made manifest, that the twelfth council of Toledo, in Spain, held A.D. 681, forbade the Jews to keep even their own festivals but to observe Sunday so as not to express outward objection to the worship of Christ. (“Dialogues on the Lord’s Day,” page 267.) This sentiment was not long in reaching England, and to be applied there. In A.D. 784, Egbert, archbishop of York, made this canon: “Let nothing else be done on the Lord’s day, but to attend on God in hymns and psalms and spiritual songs.” (Morer, page 269.) In the ninth century, says the same author, the civil power of Bavaria ordered that any one doing secular work on Sunday, after being admonished twice by the priest, must “receive no less than fifty stripes.” (“Dialogues on the First Day,” pages 261, 262.) Hanged, Drawn, and Quartered for Refusing Sunday Allegiance
In Crosby’s “History of English Baptists,” volume 2, pages 165-171, it is related that in A.D. 1661, a Seventh-day Baptist minister, Mr. John James, while preaching on Sabbath from his pulpit in Bull-steak Alley, London, was arrested on the charge of having spoken treason against the king. Utter’s “Manual of Seventh-day Baptists,” pages 21-23, says of this case, that notwithstanding the decided Christian bearing of Mr. James at his trial, he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. When dead, his heart was removed and burned, his quarters were affixed to the gates of the city, and his head raised on a pole in Whitechapel, opposite to the alley in which his meeting-house stood. But it is not necessary to dwell on these early bygone scenes to show that oppression invariably follows the enactment of Sunday laws. It is enough to ask here, If such laws5were not intended to supplement moral suasion, why have they been enacted? One certain lesson may, however, be gathered from the citations employed in this article, and that is that the uniform reason given for the enforcement of Sunday rest, has been on account of religion. Had the Reformation repudiated the papal claims of sanctity for Sunday, and adhered strictly to Bible forms of faith, the spirit of persecution under papal rule might have died at the birth of Protestantism. But having brought the Sunday rest day over from Catholicism, without any Biblical foundation for its observance, and not wishing to acknowledge its pagan-papal origin, some means of enforcing its pseudo sanctity must be devised. America on Sunday Laws in Nineteenth Century
To this end, all the American states but two have incorporated Sunday laws in their statutes. As to how these have operated where steps have been taken, by bigoted religionists, to enforce them, the records from a few states will readily show. In the state of Arkansas, during the middle eighties of the nineteenth century, no less than twenty Seventh-day Adventists were arrested for Sunday work, while those from other churches round about were working at will on the same days, and that without molestation. Some of these were so heavily fined as to take away, by forced collection, the last means of family support. The shame of this affair was briefly told, as follows, in the St. Louis Globe Democrat of November 30, 1885: “They have been from the first apparently an industrious and God-fearing people, the chief difference between them and other Christian bodies being that they observe the seventh day as the Sabbath, according to the commandment. But it seems that sectionalism can not lay down its arms even when the sacred precincts of religion are entered, so among the first things performed by the legislature at its session last winter, less than a year after these people had come into the state, was the repeal of the clause which gave them the liberty to keep the day of their choice. . . . It is a little singular that no one else has been troubled on account of the law, with perhaps one minor exception, while members of the above denomination are being arrested over the whole state. It savors just a trifle of the religious persecution which characterized the Dark Ages.”
At a later date, 1892, wholesale prosecutions were maintained, under similar conditions, in Tennessee. A Mr. King, of Obion County, was imprisoned under such circumstances that he survived but a short time his incarceration. Three others were made to work in the chain-gang along with the vilest criminals. In a statement made by the trial judge, he repudiated the Sabbathian conscience of the prisoners, saying, “Let them educate their consciences by the laws of Tennessee.” But because this could not be done with an open Bible in hand, Mr. W. H. Parker, of Springsville, was made to serve a sentence aggregating two hundred and eighty days. He, too, died soon after being released from prison. The writer was present at the trial of Day Conklin at the county seat of Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1889. In this case, the prosecuting witnesses freely acknowledged that they had worked on Sunday whenever they desired to do so, yet no charge of law-breaking was made against them. But Mr. Conklin was fined thirty dollars for the necessary act of splitting an armful of dry wood at his back door, to keep his family from suffering with cold. At a similar trial held later at Gainsville, Georgia, the prosecuting attorney, who had been present at Mr. Conklin’s trial, said of that case: “One of these Seventh-day Adventists was tried over here in Forsyth County, and I think there never was a more unrighteous conviction. There was a man named Day Conklin, who was moving on Friday. He got his goods wet on Friday, and it turned off cold. On Saturday he went out and cut enough wood to keep his family from freezing. On Sunday he still hadn’t his things dry, and it was still as cold as it had been on Saturday. He still cut enough wood to keep his family warm, and they convicted him for doing this. I say that it was an outrage, an unrighteous conviction; for he was doing the best he could. One of the jurymen told me that they did not convict him for what he had done, but for what he said he had a right to do. He said he had a right to work on Sunday.”
Without doubt this was a genuine case of religious persecution, since two of the witnesses against Mr. Conklin were known to have chopped wood the very next Sunday after the trial. But lack of space forbids the presentation of a tithe of such cases as might be offered. It is enough to say that the same kind of unrighteous prosecutions were conducted in Missouri, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, and even in cultured Massachusetts. The record of only two years (1895-6) in the states cited, shows that seventy-six persons served in jails and chain-gangs, all the way from fourteen to one hundred and twenty-nine days, as violators of iniquitous Sunday laws. Always and everywhere Sunday laws have robbed men of God-given rights just because bigoted religionists insisted upon wreaking vengeance on an adverse faith. Sunday legislation can be nothing less than oppressive legislation.