THE CHURCHES ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR FAILURE.
By W. N. Glenn
A GENTLEMAN whose attention had been called to the Blair measures now pending in Congress, makes this reply regarding a Sunday law:— "I am no bigot, nor do I favor a Puritan Sunday. But how anyone who cares for the real welfare of the public (and especially how one living on this coast) can oppose reasonable legislation on the Sunday question, passes my comprehension. You ought to spend just one Sunday at Santa Cruz in summer." It ought to be obvious to anyone who is not bigoted (and the writer of the above claims that he is not) that there cannot be any "reasonable legislation on the Sunday question," except it be to vote down any proposed measure of the kind that may arise in any legislative body. Experience has long since demonstrated that no legislation on that subject can be devised that will satisfy the advocates of Sunday laws, unless it contemplates the observance of that day as a religious institution. And every believer in the principle of the golden rule knows that such laws are very unreasonable. We have known a number of persons who claimed to favor a merely civil Sunday law, but they have invariably been professedly religious people, whose greatest concern was that the day was being desecrated. While they claim that they want simply a day in which men will not have to work,—a legal holiday,—we always hear their loudest complaints against those who already make Sunday a holiday, and go out of the cities to country places in order to enjoy it as best suits them. How is this? Is it any worse to celebrate in one's own way a voluntary holiday than it would be to have it done by compulsory cessation of labor? Is it only a law against rowdyism that is wanted? then why not use the laws already in existence? It would not cost any more time, or any more money, or any more trouble on the part of those interested, to have existing laws executed than it would to have a Sunday law enforced. And, moreover, the laws already enacted for the quelling of disturbances of every kind are available every day. All this plea of a "civil Sabbath," and "reasonable legislation on the Sunday question," is mere subterfuge. The whole agitation comes of a delusion that in some way (not one of the agitators can tell how) Sunday has been made a sacred day. When a man gets all worked up into a frenzy over some action being very wicked on one day, which he will allow without a single protest on the other six days, from year to year, it is very clear that his mind is exercised in behalf of the day rather than on account of the deed. And no amount of sophistry can conceal the fact that it is religious dogma that he wants to have enforced upon the people. In reference to the proposed constitutional amendment requiring that the principles of the Christian religion be taught under the auspices of the State, the same gentleman above referred to has this to say:— "The principles of the Christian religion are so simple and plain that, to use a Scripture phrase, 'a fool need not err therein;' and if our rotting political institutions are ever sound, it will be by aid of them." If the principles of the Christian religion are so simple as this writer assumes, how is it that those who advocate religious teaching in public schools have not demonstrated the fact in their various churches? If the churches, whose legitimate business it is to teach the principles of the Christian religion, have made such a muddle of it as to become divided into hundreds of sects, often entertaining the bitterest animosities, how could the State be expected to do any better? Is it not a tacit admission of the utter failure of modern church teaching, that the government is implored to take the work off their hands, and enforce it by law under the supervision of the churches? After eighteen hundred years of effort, we find the professed church so divided in sentiment that the only point of belief upon which the sects can anywhere near agree is the Roman dogma of Sunday sacredness. But if the government is able to teach the principles of the Christian religion in such a manner as to retain all the simplicity accorded to it in the above quotation—a thing in which the church virtually acknowledged having failed—of what further use are the churches? Having admitted their inability to successfully hold up the banner of love to God and fellow-men, they would fain have us intrust to their direction the civil arm of our republican existence. And under such a régime, the first thing they propose to do is to drown the last vestige of Protestantism in the gulf of religious legislation, and build up an "image" to that "beast" under whose rule the darkest history of the church has been written. Alas for "the principles of the Christian religion," when a degenerate church begins to teach them through the medium of worldly government! Then we may expect that our "rotting political institutions" will decay faster than ever. W. N. GLENN.