WILL THE MIDWINTER FAIR BE OPEN ON SUNDAY?
By Editor
THIS is what the Occident (Presbyterian organ of the coast) of December 21 has to say about it:— There has never been an iota of reason for hoping that the gates of the Midwinter Fair would be closed on Sunday. Petitions and protests have been presented to the directors, only to be met with scant courtesy at the best. There is no reason, in their minds, why they should not do as they please. It is a private enterprise. The nation was behind the Chicago Fair, and Congress had made conditional appropriations in its behalf. It was in a sense a national show. Not so the Midwinter Fair. No nation, State, county, or city has fathered the enterprise. It stands for nobody but itself. A score of people form a syndicate to start and run a theater. A hundred people contribute funds to sustain a baseball team. Ten thousand people contribute from ten cents to ten thousand dollars each and open up a Midwinter Fair. California has no law against open theaters, baseball sports, or Midwinter Fairs on Sunday. Churches may petition the managers to close, and these respected gentlemen can snap their fingers, inquire with a circumflex how much cash the petitioners have put in, and courteously assure the reverend callers that the time has not come to consider that question. It never will come. Chicago's shame has no warning for the Midwinter Fair. California is too fond of such shows on Sunday. The Lord's day is always the greatest day of the week for the car lines and in the park. The people that want it closed are in the minority, and even if they were not, what odds? God's law is not binding when the balance sheet is involved. It is merely a difference of opinion. If bishops and deacons were running the Fair, it would be closed on Sunday. Those who are to run it are not exactly bishops and deacons, and therefore it will be open on Sunday. Only let our friends understand that it is not California or San Francisco that gives the Fair, but a voluntary, private, though numerously-aided, association. They can do as they please, and they will. Prospects brighten for a really very fine exhibit. We may be proud of the display. We rejoice in the beauty and plenty, the strength and glory of this magnificent region of the sunset shores. But we do not vote for the Sunday show. We cannot vote against it. We can speak against it, and we do it again now. The moral force of a disregarded protest has already been applied, and the Christian people of California are as helpless to change the inevitable as to close the theaters, or stop the races, or lock the portals of Golden Gate Park on the day which God has sanctified and an ungodly people have set at naught. Let us respectfully inquire:— 1. Have not the baseball players, the theater managers, and the directors of the Fair as much right to demand and expect the churches to close as the churches have these shows? And, after all, are these amusements doing as much to undermine Christianity and morality as some of the sermons preached and services held every Sunday? That spirit which would prohibit Sunday pleasure seeking would, if it had the power, prohibit even the worship of every religion save the one considered orthodox. The principle in the one case would operate in the other. 2. It is true that in this world "God's law is not binding when the balance sheet is involved," for expediency is more than principle. But when, and where, and how has God's law forbidden the doing of aught on Sunday which may not legitimately be performed on other week days? Does not God's law say "the seventh day"? And does not Matt. 28:1; Luke 23:56, and 24:1, show that this means the seventh day of the week? But Sunday is the first day; how, then, will an open Fair on Sunday violate God's Sabbath law? 3. What kind of a Sunday did the nation keep at Chicago? Some of our most earnest Sunday-law papers tell us that the religious people attended in vast numbers, traveling on Sunday as soon as the railway rates were lowered. 4. What "moral force" has a protest anyway which is itself against God's moral law? It may have the force of public opinion, of the boycott, but what moral force, when it is diametrically opposed in matter and spirit to the great moral Governor of the universe? In the light of the simple facts of God's law, in the light of the Golden Rule, in the light of the gospel of liberty, it seems to us that the foregoing questions are worthy of consideration.