MORAL AND RELIGIOUS LEGISLATION.
The Christian Statesman of October 15 quotes a criticism against Sunday laws which states that legislation protecting the sabbath ‘becomes questionable and is of doubtful effect in proportion as it aims by positive force of law to secure moral and religious results.’ Upon this the Statesman remarks:— It doubtless means that law should not contemplate moral and religious results in protecting the people of any locality from disturbance on the day of rest. This view of the matter would give us a sabbath based, not upon divine authority and law, but upon the will of the majority. But the people who desire a sabbath at all desire it for moral and religious ends. They believe it to be a God-given right. An adequate law on the subject must therefore protect the Sabbath as a divine institution, and as a right bestowed by God. It must protect the Sabbath in the sense in which Christian people regard it. The above is a fair sample of Sunday-law fallacies. The sad thing about it is that presumably it is believed by those who publish it and by many who read it to be good argument. The only law any republic could ever justly enact would be one based on the majority; and if a Sunday law could be just at all, it would be no exception. But just as soon as a State enacts a sabbath law it gives the institution a different basis, a human basis instead of divine. It is true that ‘the people who desire a sabbath law at all, desire it for moral and religious ends;’ and God has given the only “adequate law” which ever was given or can be given to secure those ends. Christian people would be supposed to regard the Sabbath according to God’s law, to keep holy in heart and deed the seventh day. Ex. 20: 8-11. But no law of man can compel a holy keeping of any day. And if Christians wish to keep it holy, there is no law to prevent them. They may ‘lose a situation,’ what of it? Are they not willing to suffer if need for conscience’ sake? A Sunday law (for it is Sunday that the Statesman means) can only appear outwardly to protect a day as a divine institution. It can never make a day holy or divine. It can add naught to a day already divine. It may make a man seem to keep the day; but he who does it from the heart will do it, law or no law, and he who attempts to keep the day as to the Lord because of a human law is only a hypocrite. And that is all that laws for religious or moral purposes can do,—make hypocrites.