p. 8 | CHANGING TONE by G.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 18, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 38.

CHANGING TONE.

By G.

A FEW years ago, a stockholders' meeting of the Baptist Publication Society adopted a very logical and consistent resolution denouncing the persecution of certain parties in some of the Southern States for working on Sunday. The society took a consistent Christian stand on the subject at that time. But in a recent issue of the Examiner, the society's leading organ, there is a decided change of tone. Referring to the prevalent tendency to lawlessness, a special reprimand is directed against the authorities of New York City for not enforcing the Sunday laws. It states a well-known truth and a wholesome principle in the following paragraph:—

Respect for law lies at the foundation of our Anglo-Saxon civilization. Destroy that, and the whole fabric will tumble like a house of cards. It is only the public sentiment behind them that can give vitality and force to our laws. There needs to be, therefore, a recrudescence of public conscientiousness, which shall no longer condone, with good-natured indifference, the prevalent lawlessness, and which shall hold to a sterner responsibility those whose duty it is to enforce the laws.

But there is an utter failure in the argument as a whole to recognize that there are bad laws that never ought to have been enacted, and that, having been enacted, would better be allowed to lie dormant than to be made a further disgrace to the people by enforcement. When the persecutions in the South were on, against which the Baptist Publication Society so strongly protested, they were the logical outcome of the enforcement of law, the principle now so earnestly upheld without reserve by the Examiner. Those persecutions were all predicated upon that principle, and officials who were compelled by complaints of prejudiced persons to prosecute good citizens for doing little acts of secular labor on Sunday, frequently deplored their own acts, but claimed that they had no alternative but to enforce the law.

Protestant, and especially Baptist, doctrine is theoretically opposed to all religious legislation; and all Sunday laws are religious legislation, regardless of the pretext for their existence. True, the Examiner's plea for enforcement of the Sunday laws is especially aimed at the closing of saloons on Sunday, but its unqualified law-enforcement argument does not stop there. Every one who will give the subject a moment's thought knows that Sunday-closing of saloons never had any other real foundation than religious sentiment. No one has ever suggested the closing of saloons on any other one particular day of the week.

So when the Examiner pleads for enforcing any law that specially recognizes the Sunday institution, because it is law, it logically advocates any other measure having that end in view, because it may happen to become law. And when it urges the enforcement of any species of special Sunday law, it is logically committed to any other religious requirement that may become law. It is not safe to even leave ajar the door to religious legislation by any secular legislative body. Sunday-closing of saloons that are kept open all the rest of the week never yet produced any perceptible results as a temperance measure.

This change of position on the part of the Publication Society's organ, may be in a measure unwitting, but is a decided change nevertheless. There are a great many people being unwittingly drawn into the net of civil-law religion in these last days.