A FRANK ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND LAME DEFENSE.
SUNDAY morning, May 25, Rev. Mr. Silcox, of this city, preached a sermon on the necessity of Sabbath laws in general and a California Sunday law in particular. His text was Isa. 58:13, 14. According to the report of the Times of May 26, he mourned because California repealed her Sunday laws, and declared that "they ought to be enacted without delay." He said:— "It is our duty as Christians and as patriots to favor the re-establishment of these laws. Seventh-day Adventists and some others agree that the State has nothing to do, and should have nothing to do, with religion or any religious observance. But our Declaration of Independence recognizes in its very beginning our obligation to God. Our inalienable rights are declared to be God-given. It is on that principle that our republic is based. When we ask the State, therefore, to enact Sunday laws, we are acting in harmony with the Declaration of Independence. We believe it to be an inalienable right of men to rest from their labor every seventh day." Mr. Silcox was a member of the American Sabbath Union convention of the California branch recently held in San Jose. He was one of the advertised speakers, his subject being, "The Relation of the State to the Sabbath." He may be said, therefore, to speak as a representative of that organization. Now that organization has claimed again and again that all that they wanted was that a civil rest-day might be established by law. We know that it is otherwise; that Sunday as a civil day cannot be separated from Sunday as a religious day. The first includes the second. We thank Mr. Silcox for this frank statement. He tacitly admits that the State ought to have something to do with religious observances, contrary to the claims of Seventh-day Adventists, and attempts to defend it by an appeal to the Declaration of Independence. His reference proves a veritable boomerang in unskilled hands. The Declaration of Independence recognizes nothing of the kind that he claims. It speaks of nature's God in a way which the veriest atheist might consistently do. It declares that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and privileges; and the Jew, the atheist, the idolater, the Christian, could one and all subscribe to this sentiment. In fact, some of those who signed the document were not Christians nor believers in the Bible as the word of God; and he who penned the document has been almost execrated by National Reformers as an infidel. It recognizes as a self-evident truth that the Creator of man—an emphatic general term which recognizes no system, creed, or religion—has in nature given men certain equal rights, among which is not the liberty to dictate religious observances to one's fellows, but the liberty to rest or not rest on any day. It is "an inalienable right of men to rest from their labor every seventh day." It is equally an inalienable right to labor, or else the rest is not by right but by compulsion and of necessity. The right to eat and drink implies the right to abstain from eating and drinking. And this is the "liberty" which the Declaration of Independence recognizes that the Creator has endowed men with; but this is also the liberty which Mr. Silcox and his friends would take from us. There is the same8difference between Sunday laws and the Declaration of Independence that there is between light and darkness, between liberty and tyranny, between Roger Williams and Ignatius Loyola. The "liberty" of Sunday laws is the liberty for a class—those who keep Sunday. The "liberty" of the Declaration of Independence is liberty for all men. Mr. Silcox and as many as think like him have already the liberty to keep Sunday as holy as they can, but others ought to have the same liberty not to keep it. It does not require Sunday laws for the first any more than it does for the second. One more point. It is our duty as "patriots" to stand by the Declaration of Independence, but from foregoing reasons it is evident that to do this we must oppose Sunday laws. It is our duty as Christians to follow the golden rule, to do to men as we would have men do to us were circumstances reversed. We would not like the Mohammedan to compel us to observe his sacred sixth day; we would not like the infidel to compel us not to observe any day. The Sunday keeper would not desire the Jew to compel him to observe the seventh day. Therefore they ought not to compel any of these classes to observe the first day; and therefore it is the duty of Christians to oppose all Sunday laws.