PECULIAR YOKEFELLOWS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 8, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 23.

PECULIAR YOKEFELLOWS.

AGITATORS for laws to protect and promote Sunday sacredness frequently get themselves into peculiar situations by the methods which they use to bring about their object. The New York Times recently published the following item from one of its correspondents: “Last year, during a Sunday baseball controversy in one of the western cities, the mayor was waited upon by a committee of ministers urging him, of course, to prohibit ball-playing on Sunday. The mayor listened to their argument, and in replying, said: ‘I was waited upon yesterday, gentlemen, by another committee urging me to stop Sunday baseball—a committee of saloon-keepers, who complained that Sunday baseball hurt their business.’”

It was an embarrassing situation for the ministerial advocates of baseball suppression. If the mayor yielded to their plea, he would be increasing the business of the liquor men, and they would be particeps criminis. If their plea were not granted, they would feel that there was something lost from the Sunday-sacredness work, and they might be held responsible for that. And yet what would be gained to any good cause by compelling some one to spend a part of a day in one place of worldly pleasure rather than in another, is difficult for a layman to understand. The only logical thing for the ministerial committee to have done, if it were going to appeal for any kind of legislation upon the subject, would have been to have sought to do what the early Catholic Church did do, and that is, secure a law to compel the people to attend church. This would have been logical even if it did contravene the rights of men. The ministerial committee was not yet ready to go quite that far, and so were thrown into the illogical position of really aiding the business of the saloon-keeper, while they accomplished nothing for church attendance.

The incident shows, as the Sabbath Recorder well remarks, “how deeply the liquor traffic is interested in Sunday as a holiday. Since Sunday is the frequently-recurring holiday of the masses, the liquor traffic is vitally interested in whatever affects leisure on that day.” The people who would attend the Sunday baseball game are generally the people who would attend some other place of worldly pleasure if the baseball game were prohibited. So to prevent their going to a baseball game, while the saloons are open, and they have no desire to attend church, accomplishes nothing. To obviate the difficulty, they have sought to close the saloons on Sunday. But while closing the saloons on Sunday and leaving them open the rest of the week, they have given them an air of respectability and legal sanction, which also helps them in their business. Neither have they decreased the sales of liquor for the week by so doing; for those who will have liquor will lay in a supply to drink on Sunday. So the promoters of Sunday-sacredness, while decreasing the liquor sales little, if any at all, have given to the saloon-keeper a standing which it did not have before.

There is nothing good gained for any cause that must compel adherence to its principles. There is nothing gained to the cause of Christ in any way by laws that compel men to act what they do not feel, to appear religious when at heart they are hungering for the pleasures of this world.