THE SPIRIT OF SUNDAY LAWS.
THIS is what the San Francisco Argonaut said some time ago with reference to Sunday laws; and who can say that it is not true:— To revive Sabbatarianism to-day is like restoring the Spanish Inquisition and stretching a man on the rack because he could not understand the Trinity. It implies a denial of the proposition that the world has learned anything in the past three centuries. It asserts a spirit of intolerant interference with personal liberty, which the men who established the independence of the colonies would not have endured for a moment. It gives the lie to the teaching of every American moralist who ever wrote. It is a flat denial of the article of the Bill of Rights, which concedes to everyone the right of happiness provided he injures no one else. And of the class which advocate them, it declares that they would relight the fires of Smithfield if they dared, and would restore the thumbscrew and the boot as means of salvation. They base their impudent interference with personal liberty on the proposition that they alone know what is right, and that all who differ with them should be punished for so doing. They are the lineal descendants of that Archbishop Fonseca, who, if he could have had his way, would have sent Columbus to prison for life for the crime of discovering America. Other progenitors of theirs were the members of the Holy Office, who tortured Galileo for discovering that the world moved. Such bigots claim to have a monopoly of religious truth, and to be the sole depository of the purposes of the Almighty. It is they, and not the agnostics, who are emptying the churches. Colonel Ingersoll might discourse for years without affecting more minds than Rochester did in his day. But when the great preachers of the day, the ministers of God, standing in their pulpits, proclaim that the workingman shall be barred out from the Exposition on the seventh day of the week, it is small wonder that these same ministers preach to half-empty churches.