p. 100 | HARD ON THE BARBERS by H. A. St. John

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 17, 1890

HARD ON THE BARBERS.

By H. A. St. John

A PROMINENT advocate of human Sunday laws, while on the Pacific Coast, was wont to tell a story of one hundred barbers, who lived and labored in some distant city. The ostensible object of the story was to create sentiment in favor of Sunday laws. The story, however, tended to create the opposite sentiment in the careful, unbiased thinker.

Well, to the story. It runs thus: The one hundred barbers of a certain city sought to enter into an agreement to shut up shop, and not work on the first day of the week, commonly called Sunday. Ninety-nine of this number were found ready to enter into this compact; the one-hundredth man said, No, he would not. So the whole ninety-nine were compelled to work on Sunday, because that one man would not stop work on that day. We were told that a stringent Sunday law was needed to make that one barber rest on Sunday, so that those ninety-nine barbers could rest on Sunday.

What a fine set of Sunday-keepers those ninety-nine barbers would make! They did not have conscience, or principle, or moral backbone, enough to keep Sunday unless everybody else did. This class of persons want a Sunday law to compel everybody to keep Sunday so they can keep it. If another person is allowed to work on Sunday, and thus make a few dimes, then they are obliged to work on Sunday, or lose a few dimes; and how then can they keep Sunday holy if there are a few dimes at stake?

A cry is being made for Sunday laws for the benefit of workingmen. Are these ninety-nine barbers a sample of the workingmen that are appealing for stringent Sunday laws? If a man will not keep Sunday when he has the privilege of doing so, just because others will make more money than he does, or because he can make more money by so doing, what is his Sunday-keeping, or his religion, or his moral principle, worth anyway? Is it worth a Sunday law? Would a Sunday law compelling him to keep Sunday, and removing his self objections to its observance, make him more of a man, or a Christian, or a rest-keeper? Such persons may be salt that

has no savor. The world might be filled with such time-servers, such man-made Sunday-Christians, and they would be of no more real moral value to the world than just so many great balls of putty.

Now let it be remembered that one forcible argument, so called, for Sunday laws, when fairly stated, is this, that there are thousands of laborers in this nation who do not keep Sunday because they would lose money by so doing. But a human Sunday law would enable them to make just as much money, with less work, and they could keep Sunday. And they would like this. Why, of course they would like it—the same wages, with a day off, why should they not like it? The same wages, with two days off, would no doubt be gladly accepted also. How easy for a government to make Christians of this stamp by law.

H. A. ST. JOHN