p. 133 | EDITORIAL NOTES by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 24, 1878

EDITORIAL NOTES.

By Editor

The items given this week in our new department, “Notes of News,” are as good as a chapter on the signs of the times.

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The East.

More conflicts are evidently approaching. The vaunted peace of Berlin is now seen to be only a truce, and one which promises to be very brief at that. The papers are filled with reports of the mysterious movements of Russian troops, their continued hold on places in the vicinity of Constantinople, the probability that the British fleet will return to its former position, the Mussulmans arming in the Rhodope hills, Mohammedans resisting Roumanian rule, etc. The coming winter seems as likely to be a winter of carnage in that region as was the last.

Not a Bad Illustration.

“ARE you going to fight the Seventh-day Adventists?” was the question lately asked of a first-day Adventist preacher. “No,” said he, “I am not; for those Seventh-day Adventists are like a dry mullein stalk: the more you strike them, the more the seed will scatter.”

The Sabbath in England.

THE Methodist Recorder, of London, after remarking that no special procedure has appeared on the part of either the friends or the enemies of the Sabbath, and that, “so far as legislative action or public movements are concerned, the question of Sabbath observance remains materially unchanged either for the better or for the worse,” says:—

“Despite, however, the apparent lull of the moment, it is evident to every thoughtful man who has observed of late years the signs of the times, that we are approaching a crisis in the history of the Sabbath, and, perhaps, in the history of the Christian religion.”

The Sabbath in California Politics.

IT is proposed that the Sabbath and Christian religion be acknowledged in the new constitution of California. This proposition is awakening some discussion in that State. The proposed articles upon which the agitation turns are these:—

I. The first day of the week to be made obligatory upon all as the Sabbath—notwithstanding the conscientious dissent of both Jews and Seventh-day Christians.

II. Jesus Christ to be recognized as the ruler of nations.

III. Church property to be exempt from taxation.

Correspondence in reference to these propositions lately appeared in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, W. E. Ijams opposing and N. R. Johnston advocating them. Ijams urged that Christianity was never so pure as when it asked no favors from the State, as witness its history from Nero to Diocletian; that with political influence it becomes a monster of persecution; and that “it is an ill omen when any form of religion finds it necessary to appeal to legislative bodies for the sanction of its dogmas.”

On the other hand, Johnston urged that the people of California, with few exceptions, are believers in Christianity and the moral law of the Bible; that Christianity has been declared to be the common law of the land; and that as the moral law is given to the State, Christians have a right to ask and expect the State to enforce its own law,—the law of the Sabbath.