On the 26th of February, the Christian Advocate tells us, there were nine different bills demanding consideration before the committee on Legal Affairs of the Legislature of Massachusetts. One of these bills asked that the Hebrew shopkeeper have the legal right to do business on Sunday. One rabbi contended that “in order to meet competition and keep up with the struggle for existence many Jewish storekeepers are forced to transgress the tenets of their own faith by remaining open for business on Saturday, when if they knew they could remain open legally the following day, they would live up to their religious duty and stay closed.” No truly conscientious Sabbath-keeper ever ought to put forth such a plea as that. If he has faith in God and faith in the Lord’s Sabbath, he ought to keep the day anyway, whatever might be the consequences.
That is the same plea that is put forth by keepers of the first day: “We can not keep the first day unless you will close other shops on that day.” It is an utter denial of faith in God and clearly indicates that the religion that would make such a plea as that is hardly worth considering. Yet the Christian Advocate declares that to ordain such a day, that is, Sunday, without the protection of law, would bring about a similar result such as is seen in the Old World; and while it feels that the Jew would not be accommodated because that would demoralize Sunday, yet on the other hand it feels that the Sunday-keeper himself ought to be protected because he would be thrown into competition with a very large class were it not for the law.
The plea is a pitiful one. If the Sabbath is a Christian institution, it ought to stand on the same basis that all other Christian institutions stand—in the faith of the Christian himself and in his personal relationship to God and to His church. The state has absolutely nothing to do with it. It is in itself a crime to make criminal on one day of the week what is not criminal on every other day of the week.
The Advocate argues that some of the Jews sell seven days in the week, and then follows this incident: “We have heard of a Christian and a Jew who were partners in a business concern, open seven days in the week. The Christian man ran the Saturday business, while the Jew spent the day after the manner of his religion.” But that was their legal right. At least, that was their inalienable right as men, and the law had no business to prevent it. The Christian ought to have conscience enough to do otherwise, and so also ought the Jew. If either were misrepresenting his brethren, the communion to which he belonged ought to have dealt with him. It was not a matter however for the state to deal with.
As to just how much our Sunday-law friends believe in exempting those who may not agree with them, take the following sentence from the article: “One thing is sure; if there be a law for Sunday, and exemption given to a whole class of people on any ground, much greater evils will follow to the whole people than under the present situation. . . . To make all things equal in their operation on all classes has never been possible. The principle of the greatest good to the greatest number must ever settle many a difficulty.”
Cabin where Lincoln was born Feb. 12, 1809. Place of birth matters little.
The Christian Advocate and its coworkers for religious legislation can easily help matters in the things suggested in the first two of the last sentences, by refusing to have anything to do with religious legislation. Religious laws are always class laws, always unequal laws, always discriminating laws, always unjust laws. The very principle of tyranny is in them from the initiative to the close. The principle of the greatest good to the greatest number is another one of those fallacies which will ever work out tyranny. Such a condition ought to come as a result always, but never as a basic principle from which to operate. The only true principle is the absolute protection of the individual in all his inalienable rights. If the individual is protected, all are protected, and the very reason for the very basis of civil law, the reason for its existence, is that the weak may be protected instead of the strong, the minority instead of the majority. In a truly free republican government it ought to be the individual, and in the individual are protected all others.
