Let Us Be Vigilant by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 10, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 10.

Let Us Be Vigilant.

By Editor

It has been often and well said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” It is true. Once knowing and enjoying liberty, remembering the price which was paid for it, and believing that it is forever established in fundamental and statute law, men become careless. Some judicial prejudice of a high court perverts both constitution and law; and we have had altogether too much of judge-made law during the last few years. Class and religious legislation creep in, and are thought harmless. But it is the thin end of the entering wedge. Our late struggle in California over the Sunday amendment before the Assembly is a case in point. The measure was declared by its framers, proponents, supporters, to be purely civil, to have nothing of religion in it. Some of them grew indignant when we declared that it was religious, that it was a demand for civil enactment to support a religious institution. The chief advocate of the measure in the Assembly, the one who introduced the proposed amendment, frankly acknowledged that the measure was religious, that its purpose was to enforce the command of God, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” We have then in that effort not only an attempt at religious legislation, but an attempt to make the state an interpreter of the law of God. What will our contemporaries now say who declared that the measure was not religious?

It ought to have been evident on the face of it that the object aimed at was religious; for the one great force behind all the Sabbath-law or Sunday-law agitation is the religious bodies, and in order to make their agitation effective, they have confederated together for that purpose. This has been done in the National Reform Movement, in the American Sabbath Union, and now in the Federation of Protestant Churches.

It is still well for us never to forget just what we were told by Congress in 1829 on this same Sabbath question. Petitions poured in from every side from religious bodies asking that the Sunday mails be closed. In answer to those petitions the report which Congress adopted declares: “Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object are always dangerous. The first effort of the kind calls for the establishment of a principle which would lay the foundation for dangerous innovations upon the spirit of the Constitution; upon the religious rights of the citizens. If adopted, it may be justly apprehended that the future measures of the government will be strongly marked, if not eventually controlled, by the same influence. All religious despotism commences by combination and influence, and when that influence begins to operate upon the political institutions of a country, the civil power soon bends under it, and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequence.” “If the principle is once established that religion or religious observances shall be interwoven with our legislative acts, we must pursue it to the ultimatum.” The enactment of a Sunday law is the establishment of a vicious principle, which, if developed and perpetuated, would eventually ruin both church and state and destroy the liberties of the people. Let California abjure it forever.