SUNDAY LAWS BRIEFLY ANALYZED.
By John Vuilleumier
The Sunday crusade has two modes of operation: First, it invites the churches to the better observance of the rest-day, and urges pastors to preach on the subject one or more times each year. Secondly, it seeks to obtain from the state, laws enforcing Sunday. The first method of work agrees perfectly with the spirit of the Gospel; the reading and explanation of God's commandments from the pulpit, and earnest pleas based on the Holy Scriptures and experience, are certainly Christian ways of bringing about a reformation on the matter of the day of rest among Christians. This done, it will be natural and easy enough to seek the conversion of unbelievers. Each true moral reform must have its starting-point in the Christian Church. Indeed, Christ compares the church with salt, whose aseptic qualities preserve food with which it is mixed. Christ adds: “But if the salt has lost his savor, wherewith shall it be seasoned?” If the church itself is unfaithful, how can she work for the salvation of the world? If Christians have not the strength to keep the Sabbath, how can they impart it to unbelievers? This brings us to consider the second mode of operation, viz., Sunday laws. This method is open to some very serious objections which we will briefly state. In the first place, religious institutions can not be enforced violently. Force is contrary to the very essence of faith. Indeed faith ends where force begins. And the whole Gospel of Christ is based on faith, and knows no other power than the Holy Spirit. If God could be satisfied with external, mechanical works, enforced by human law, then St. Augustine's theory, adopted by the Inquisition, would be correct. This theory was that it is better to save a soul through bodily torment and against its own will, than to allow it to lose heaven. But this theory is as false as it is repulsive. The apostle Paul tells us that man is “justified by faith without the deeds of the law,” that we are “justified freely by His [God's] grace;” but this full salvation is not contrary to good works; for he adds that faith, true faith, “worketh by love,” and that this “love is the fulfilling of the law.” Rom. 3: 20-31; 13: 10; Gal. 5: 6. Faith then brings good works; she alone can do it; while works without faith are “dead works,” veritable sins before God. Heb. 9: 14. All the persecutions of the past are nothing but the fruits of the Catholic theory of religion enforced through civil law. It has for centuries soaked the earth in blood and is now justly abhorred by mankind; for it treads liberty of conscience underfoot, and makes the church a battle-ground for the most unholy ambitions. M. Ernest Naville, professor in the University of Geneva, Switzerland, member of the Institute of France, made the following declaration a few years ago in a published lecture: “There can be no question, in the present state of the society, of the state law enforcing Sunday observance in the name of religion and in the sense of a religious obligation.” This distinguished professor might safely have gone a step farther and said that never at any time should there have been any question of any state laws enforcing Sunday, or any other religious institution. But why is this entirely out of the question at the present time?—Because the false theocratic theory (men ruling the conscience instead of God) is so unmasked before the world that it has now little chance of succeeding as such. But this same writer, and with him all the Sunday-law advocates, thinks that these same Sunday laws become perfectly legitimate if they are presented from a new standpoint: “from a social standpoint,”—some say “from a hygienic standpoint.” This garb, if we may so call it, does not change the matter at all. The sphere of the day of rest can no more be changed than a piano can be applied in farming, or the brain used instead of the stomach. To thus secularize the rest-day is to pervert it, to destroy it. The promoters of the Sunday law have confessed a hundred times that the Sabbath without God is no Sabbath at all, and yet they do not seem to see that they are contradicting themselves when they wish to enforce it by the power of men, or when they call it a civil, a social, or a hygienic measure. That this hygienic argument is groundless, has been demonstrated in recent Sunday congresses, in which the standpoint of hygiene was one of the principal arguments under discussion. This was the case in the congresses held in Paris, in 1889 and 1892. In the latter congress, the only scientist who spoke at all, a physician, spoke as follows: “From physiology alone it is difficult to establish a uniform rule of rest, which can be applied scientifically to all professions; and it is impossible to demonstrate experimentally that work must be stopped exactly on the seventh day.” And he added, “There can be no general rule formulated, and what would be true in one profession and under certain conditions would not be true in others; indeed this problem is very complex, and admits of no mathematical solution.” The proof that hygiene is advanced only for the sake of expediency, is furnished us by the International Sunday-rest Federation, whose headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland, and which is more or less at the bottom of every Sunday movement in Europe. In the Bulletin of said federation, for February, 1901, we read the following confession: “In 1889, through fear of clerical workings, the French Government would not authorize during the Exposition a Congress of Sunday-rest, and the name of Congress of the Weekly-rest had to be substituted. Notwithstanding, this congress worked exclusively in favor of Sunday rest, and not at all in favor of resting on any day in the week.” This confession means that under the garb of hygiene, this congress dealt with religion purely and simply. Thus it is confessed by the Sunday-law advocates that the hygienic argument is nothing but a sham. The Sunday bills introduced in the legislatures of several Swiss cantons in the year 1901, on the plea of hygiene, contain a great number of exceptions in favor of many lines of industry and business, which are considered necessary on Sunday. One might expect that the legislators, after stating, as they do, that these laws are designed to protect the very existence of the people, would be anxious to give those who are deprived of the benefits of Sunday rest another day in the week on which to rest. But far from it; these bills mention no such thing, yet they call this weekly rest an absolute necessity for the health and life of the people. One may ask whether the weekly rest is hygienic only on the first day of the week, or if tobacco dealers, liquor men, barbers, bakers, confectioners, and photographers (not to speak of railroad men), have not the same right to live as the rest of mankind. Does this not prove again, and beyond dispute, that this hygienic argument is only an excuse for the introduction of a religious measure? Another reason advanced in favor of Sunday laws is that they will stem the tide of dissipation and worldliness. This reason is somewhat more plausible than the preceding one; yet, if we look at it closely, Sunday laws bring precisely the opposite result. Everybody knows that Sunday is the day in which intemperance and immorality make the most victims. What is the cause of this? Evidently the fact that on this day the people have more leisure than on all others. But this very leisure is just what Sunday laws will increase a hundredfold, and with it, in the same ratio, intemperance and immorality. The general meeting of the above-named International Sunday-rest Federation brought out the fact that in 1900 “in all the land a torrent of pleasures and demoralizing amusements threatened the usefulness of Sunday, and that wherever the day is not used as a day of worship, it bids fair to degenerate into a day of dissipation.” Pastor Probst, of Zurich, one of the most active agents of the movement in Europe, declares that upon consulting with physicians, judges, and ministers, he is forced to conclude that “for a great many it would be better to work seven days in the week than six.” Could the stultification be more complete? Thus one of two things will be true: The day of rest will be either a religious institution freely observed, and then it will be a blessing to those who observe it; or else it will be made compulsory by law, and then it will become more than ever a veritable calamity for the masses. Such is ever the result of changing the order of God. Sunday laws are nothing less than an unconscious going back to state religion. It is a sign of our times, and may well be called an act of frantic delusion on the part of Christendom in the presence of the alarming situation of society. Instead of casting themselves, in sackcloth and ashes, at the feet of their legitimate Bridegroom, the churches throw themselves into the arms of an unlawful protector, the civil power, or the world, of which, alas! they have become captive. From a bride faithful and pure, they become that woman described in the Book of Revelation, which for grandeur and pomp sells her charms to the kings of the earth, only to share in their dreadful fate at the coming of the Master. One evil leads to another. Sunday laws, like all religious laws, will be used to persecute those who place the law of God above human decrees, and for whom the rights of conscience are inalienable. For some years, in the United States, the freest country in the world, Sunday laws have been used to prosecute and imprison about two hundred people, whose ostensible crime was that they labored on Sunday, but whose real offense was that they rested on the seventh day of the week, “according to the commandment.” In England, in Scandinavia, and in Switzerland, within a few years, honest Christian people have also been prosecuted for the same reason. In Basle, Switzerland, the publishing house of the Seventh-day Adventists was obliged to close its doors in order to escape bankruptcy from increasing fines, and its manager, a minister of the Gospel, was imprisoned and banished. And all this in the name of a law which claims to enforce the weekly rest for “reasons of health,” and against people who religiously stop work on the seventh day of the week. We are happy to state, however, that not all Christendom is siding with this backward movement. There is a true rest-day movement, a forward movement, which calls upon the people to return to the true Gospel,—the Gospel of free salvation, through faith, and not by the works of the flesh; the Gospel of the regeneration of the individual through the Holy Spirit, bringing obedience to God's law, including the Fourth Commandment. It is in the name of this Gospel, ignored and rejected by the Sunday movement, that we raise this protest. We do so with love and pity for those who go astray, but also full of confidence in the final triumph of truth, liberty, and righteousness, because God lives, and because His cause is immortal. This Gospel, dear reader, we commend unto you. Will you not accept it, and be saved?