p. 16 | “Morality” by Law

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 7, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 36.

“Morality” by Law.

Morality by law is as the old proverb says of beauty, but “skin deep.” It is all put on or forced on, and as soon as the restraint is effectually off, morality flies away. It was thought by the Sunday-law advocates that a great victory had been gained when the St. Louis Exposition was closed on Sunday, but we are told again and again that many of the great crowds of strangers in St. Louis on Sunday throng the questionable places within reach; fill the resorts, and frequent the saloons and brothels. The most moral place where the people would go is closed against them. And all this is done, as the Portland Oregonian remarks: “under the mistaken notion that the masses of the people can be driven or forced to spend the Sunday as a minority, doubtless of good intention, but of mistaken judgment, insist they shall.” The leader in all this Sunday-closing work is Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts. National Reformism and the Dark Ages is potent within the whole scheme. Its advocates may not know this, tho they have been told it frequently. They do not see the working out of principles. They seem to think that the same principles which in earnest, mistaken men produced the Dark Ages would work out better with them. But “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”