Your ShelfYour Projects

Sunday Laws in Japan

33%

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 14, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 2.

Read the full edition

Sunday Laws in Japan

A NATIVE pastor, says the Union Gospel News, writes “that there are five important things which he says the Christian religion has accomplished for the empire of Japan. First, the adoption by their government of our calendar; next, the enactment of a law compelling the inhabitants to keep one day in the week as a day of rest, which is our sabbath; then the adoption of our common-school system; fourth, freedom to bury their dead as they like (formerly the body at death had to be given to some Buddhist priest); finally, the separation of Church and State, which gives them entire freedom of worship and opens Japan as never before to Christian missionaries.”
All this would be good if true. But the second and fifth can not both be true. Sunday is solely a religious or church institution; and when it is upheld, supported, or enforced by the power of the state, it forms a union of church and state. It is not the Christian religion of Christ which leads to such results.