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DANGEROUS GROUND

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 19, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 37.

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“DANGEROUS GROUND.”

This is what the Appeal, an Afro-American paper, issued simultaneously in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, and Dallas, says respecting Tennessee’s action concerning Seventh-day Adventists:—
“Tennessee goes deeper and deeper in her course of injustice that she has chosen under her Sunday laws, in her treatment of the people. The authorities do not seek to compel them to do work on their day of rest by the ordinary methods, but they do threaten them with a longer term of imprisonment to make up for Saturdays as so much lost time. [This they actually did.] This course certainly gives evidence that the sympathies of the county authorities are with the prosecution, and the next thing we may expect will be some atrocious means adopted to compel them to violate their conscience by working on their Sabbath.
“A young man by the name of Cathy, whose widowed mother is an Adventist, was convicted for cutting wood for his mother on Sunday. Hitherto he has not observed the Sabbath of the Adventists, but on July 20, which was Saturday, he refused to work, and was forthwith put in irons and fed on bread and water!!! Now as the Adventists, who conscientiously observe the seventh day as the Sabbath, are not required to work on that day, the next step for Tennessee, and a logical one, too, is for her to devise some method by which to determine whether this act was done in conscience. Now the rack and the thumbscrew were the inventions of former days by which to unveil the motives of men, and do these men have the hardihood to follow to the logical result? It certainly looks that way. Mr. R. R. Whaley, of Church Hill, Md., a Seventh-day Adventist, who has served two terms in the county jail for Sunday work in his own garden, is now under arrest, caused by a man who is a churchgoer, but stayed away from church in order to watch for evidence against the man, and secured the arrest!!! This is in America.”