STATE RIGHTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.
By G.
HOW DOES this sound as a legal proceeding in a country posing before the world as “the land of the free”? It is from the Times of Chattanooga, Tenn., dated February 19—not 1701, as might be supposed, but 1901:— “Charles Hope is the name of an industrious white man of this city, who was arrested yesterday by Constable Newman on a warrant and indictment from the court at Lafayette, Ga., charging him with having worked on Sunday during the period of his sojourn at that point, to the sorrow of the righteous and truly good. Hope leaves for Lafayette to-day to face the dismal charge. Under the Sunday law of Georgia, Mr. Hope is liable to a fine of $1,000 and a year in the chain-gang.” The people of the United States, in the early sixties, spent billions of money, destroyed property of incalculable value, and shed untold streams of blood in order to secure to the negro the privileges of political liberty. The States that held him in civil slavery were compelled at the point of the bayonet and at the cannon’s mouth to set him free. But any State in the Union may deprive any person, black or white, of the boon of religious liberty—of liberty of conscience in the matter of Sunday observance—and the general government declines to interfere with the State laws. In the matter of civil liberty, the doctrine of State rights was overwhelmed by the general government in the blood of her manhood; but when it comes to religious liberty, State rights are upheld without limit. Yet there is not even a reasonable question as to whether civil or religious liberty is paramount among the essentials of a free government; all history attests that in the absence of religious liberty, civil liberty is at best but nominal, being at the mercy of religious bigotry. When the Pilgrims fled from the Old World to the wilderness of America, it was not primarily to seek civil liberty. True, they were deprived of that in their former homes, but it was thru religious persecution. They embarked on their perilous voyage in quest of religious liberty. The question and the answer are in the following familiar lines:— “What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine?
The wealth of seas? the spoils of war?—
They sought a faith’s pure shrine.” And there was no trouble about civil liberty in the New World until the Pilgrims themselves set up a system of religious intolerance—fines, imprisonment, banishment, and death for conscience’ sake.