THEORY VERSUS PRACTISE.
By G.
The very best of theory is often practically stultified by inconsistent action. The prominence given to an exception sometimes is the real utility of doctrine acknowledged to be orthodox. A case in point is reported in the Virginia Messenger for February:— “At a meeting of the ministerial conference in Richmond, the latter part of January, 1901, Dr. Thomson was called on to make a statement of the work of the league to be done in that city. He said he was doing an educational work in reference to Sabbath observance, that he was trying to teach the people that our government was founded upon distinctly Christian principles. The government, in fostering the Christian religion, was simply conforming to the purpose of its founders. “Rev. Dr. J. B. Hawthorne, of the Baptist Church, took issue with the speaker, and said that if Dr. Thomson was doing any such work he was violating the principles of the Richmond Sunday Observance League, as well as the fundamental conception which Richmond people hold of the relation of civil government to religion; that the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies did not embody the American idea of religion, which was expressed by Roger Williams. The American idea is that the State has no religious function, and civil legislation in the interest of any religion is a violation of the right of conscience; that the State had no more right to favor the Christian religion than it had to favor the Mohammedan religion. “The matter was referred to the Conference Committee of Ministers, who should voice the views of the Baptist Church on this subject. “On February 4 this committee again met and unanimously indorsed the views expressed by Dr. Hawthorne as being fully in accord with their own and the Baptist churches'. Their report was lengthy; they refused to follow the lead taken by Dr. Thomson, but they are heartily in favor of the Richmond Sunday Observance League, so far as its efforts are directed to the observance of Sunday as a civil institution.” Thus the action of these people in indorsing compulsory Sunday observance is in direct antagonism to the wholesome doctrine outlined by Dr. Hawthorne, and nominally approved. The expression of sentiment was in support of the right, but the action was in the line of Dr. Thomson’s Church-and-State teaching. This “civil-Sunday” theory was conceived in the interest of the religious Sunday, and the originators of the idea designed it simply as a stepping-stone to the compulsory religious observance of the day. The man who has been the leading promoter of the “civil-Sunday” rest day, has widely published the sentiment that to take the religion out of the observance is to take the rest out. In California, leading advocates of the delusion have openly admitted that it was but an opening wedge to serve a purpose until public sentiment could be educated to the acceptance of a Sunday law on religious grounds. And the fact is patent that there would be no suggestion at all of a legal rest day on Sunday, were it not for the alleged sacredness of the day, and the common religious observance of it by the people. The “civil-rest-day” plea and the “temperance” plea of closing saloons on that day were designed by their originators to win conscientious Sunday observers over to a practical acquiescence in religious legislation. And it is surprising to see how many otherwise wary people are being caught by the bait. That a company of learned men who could understand and indorse the sentiments enunciated by Dr. Hawthorne could so far make void those sentiments as to favor the work of the Sunday Observance League—which is right in line with the work of Dr. Thomson, with whom they thought to disagree—is beyond ordinary logic. It can only be accounted for by the fact that we are living in the last days, when, by the rejection of truth, men become the victims of “strong delusion.” See 2 Thess. 2:7-12.