p. 1 | MARYLAND SUNDAY CASES by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 25, 1893

MARYLAND SUNDAY CASES.

By Editor

The right to work on Sunday is a subject that is causing considerable discussion in Maryland, near Centreville. A number of Seventh-day Adventists insist on working in their own fields on Sunday, contrary to the law. When they are arrested and fined, they prefer to go to jail rather than pay their fine, having an idea that by this sort of martyrdom they are advancing their cause. As this recurs every few weeks, considerable attention is being excited, and persons, so it is said, are attracted to the trials from New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and other parts of the country. These people are, we assume, sincere in their religious beliefs, and they are said to be unusually orderly and law-abiding. It is a serious question whether the Sunday law should not be flexible enough to grant such men, who conscientiously observe another day as the Sabbath, the right to engage in work in their own fields, where they disturb the religious devotion of nobody else.—New York Voice.

The item will speak for itself to every Christian who has progressed so far in divine things as to realize a modicum of what is the meaning of the Golden Rule. Seventh-day Adventists do not work on Sunday with the "idea that by this sort of martyrdom they are advancing their cause." They work on Sunday because to acknowledge that day as a sacred day is disloyalty to God, and because God has given them the right to work; and it is the duty of government not to take away that right, but to protect them in that right. Government has no more right to say that one Seventh-day Adventist shall not work on Sunday than it has to say that the great mass of Sunday people shall not work Saturday. It would have no more right to say that one Sunday keeper should keep Saturday if all the rest of the world kept it, than it has now to say that one man shall keep Sunday because the great majority keep that day.

Our contemporary questions whether "the Sunday law should not be flexible enough to grant such men, who conscientiously observe another day as the Sabbath, the right to engage in work," etc. Now what power has the government to pass upon the conscientiousness of any observance? Why does not the Sunday law demand that it shall be kept "conscientiously" by the Sunday keeper? If a Sunday law is right at all, it should be enforced upon all alike. The moment an exemption is conceded, the injustice of the law is acknowl

edged. Whatever is civil on Monday is civil on Sunday.

No one in this State, and, so far as we know, in all the States, has any right to disturb divine worship on any day. Governments do not make rights; their duty is to protect all equally in their equal rights, and the rights of one man are as sacred as the rights of ten million. If the vast majority of the people were Mohammedans, would the Voice contend that they had a right to compel all to observe Friday, with some possible exemptions for a “conscientiousness” approved by Mohammedan authorities? And would the refusal of the Christian to bow to the rival authority of the “Prophet” be construed as the Voice has impliedly construed the motives of Seventh-day Adventists? What good does a Sunday law do, anyway?