Sunday Closing of Saloons.
The movement for the Sunday closing of saloons is not in the interests of true temperance; it is but a step toward the universal Sunday law. Ten years ago Seventh-day Adventists published this statement:— “Combining the temperance reform with the Sunday movement, they represent themselves as laboring to promote the highest interests of society, and those who refuse to unite with them are denounced as the enemies of temperance and reform. But the fact that a movement to establish error is connected with a work which is in itself good, is not an argument in favor of the error. We may disguise poison by mingling it with wholesome food, but we do not thereby change its nature. On the contrary, it is rendered more dangerous, as it is more likely to be taken unawares.”—Great Controversy, vol. 4, p. 404. Just now we have a verification of this work in this city. “The Council for the Suppression of the Saloons” (on Sunday) has been assiduously laboring to obtain a Sunday-closing law in Oakland. Friends of religious liberty, while distinctly and emphatically disavowing all connection or sympathy with the saloons, have protested against the Sunday movement as inimical to religious liberty, and a first step to a union of church and state in California. For this cause one “reform” paper has been pleased to do just what is said will be done in the quotations above, and has rung the changes on “Adventists, thugs, and saloonists” in harmony with its own soul’s music. It is stated over and over again that the Sunday closing is a temperance movement, and some of our friends who do not believe in Sunday laws have thought that those opposing it were doing wrong or were compromising themselves in manfully protesting against the deceptive scheme. That those who have opposed this movement in Oakland on the ground that it is in the interests of religious legislation, of a full-fledged Sunday law, with all that means, are justified, take the following testimony from some of the men behind the Sunday-closing effort. Says the California State Sabbath Association at its meeting held in San Francisco, May 27, 1895:— “The object of this association shall be . . . to promote religious influence by STATE LEGISLATION and by COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL ORDINANCES; to prevent ALL OPEN ACTS OF SABBATH [Sunday] DESECRATION; and to SECURE BY LAW THE OBSERVANCE OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE WEEK AS A DAY OF REST.”—Constitution. “That among THE FIRST THINGS for which this association will labor will be the CLOSING OF ALL SALOONS ON THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH.”—Resolution unanimously passed. In the report of a ministers’ meeting held in San Francisco October 7, printed in the Chronicle of the next day, Rev. N. R. Johnson, president of the State Sabbath Association, is declared to have said that “the closing of the saloons on Sunday would be a step toward bringing about the desired end,”—a state Sunday law. The “American Sabbath Union,” upon the ruins of which this present association was built, claims the credit of every Sunday-closing ordinance in the state, all of which were but steps to a full-fledged Sunday law. So much for this movement. After that?—Well, read the history going before in the course of Rome from A.D. 321 and onward. Sunday laws are union of church and state, and union of church and state means ruin to both. Therefore we protest.