CONGREGATIONALISTS, CATHOLICS, SUNDAY.
By Editor
THE reports of the local press of Sleepy Eye, Minn., report the following as having been put forth by the Union Congregational Church of that place, coupled with an appeal to newspapers, and other churches, to aid in securing a reform touching Sunday. The utterance was in these words:— Resolved, That we, the undersigned Christian Church of Sleepy Eye, Minn., do most emphatically declare, in the light of Sacred Scriptures and of the true Christians in every age, that the playing of games, such as ball playing, croquet playing, billiard playing, cards, chess, checkers, and all such games, for pleasure, diversion or otherwise, on the sabbath day, commonly called Sunday, is unlawful, and degrading to good morals. The interest awakened by this appeal brought out a reply from a Roman Catholic, as follows:— REPLY TO SUNDAY OBSERVANCE.
It is stated that Sunday laws are civil laws, and have nothing to do with religion. They were born in a union of Church and State, and at a time when the rulers were Roman Catholics. The object of them was to enforce respect for a religious dogma, as their titles and wordings clearly show. When the separation of the Church and the State took place in the Constitution of the United States, there could, in fact, be made only a civil disguise of them, which, from time to time, had always been boldly thrown off; for all persons are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty, and no person ought, by any law, to be molested in person or estate on account of his religious belief or his religious practice. The imprisonment of the Seventh-day Adventists in several States, and fines of about $55 in each of many individual cases, for performing bodily labor on the Lord's day, commonly called Sunday, prove that the government assumes the right to enforce a religious dogma of the Catholic Church. We have civil duties we owe to the State and to each other. The Bible numbers them all. But when the law of the State enforces on us a dogma which we do not find in the Bible, and which is solely a Roman Catholic one, what will those Christians say to it who pronounce the Bible their sole teacher in doctrine and morals? The Episcopal Church in her twentieth article of religion admits that the church cannot ordain anything contrary to God's written word. The Augsburg confession in 1530 clearly admitted that the observance of the Lord's day had been appointed by the Catholic Church only. The historian R. Baird writes: "The rulers of Massachusetts put the Quakers to death and banished Antinomians and Anabaptists, not because of their religious tenets, but because of their violation of civil laws. This is the justification they pleaded, and it was the best they could make of it. Wherever there is a union of Church and State, heresy and heretical practices are apt to become violations of the civil code, and are punished no longer as errors in religion, but as infractions of the laws of the land. These defenders of the Inquisition have always spoken and written in justification of that awful tribunal, for who has not read of the Spanish Inquisition, of the Protestant Inquisition in England and Germany? In fact, have we not here in this free country great and little inquisitors, who may denounce us to the government should we work on Sundays, and thus incur the penalty of paying a fine of about $55, or ninety days' imprisonment?" The Catholic Church for over one thousand years before the existence of a Protestant, by virtue of her divine mission, changed the day from Saturday to Sunday because he who called himself the Lord of the Sabbath, endowed her with his own power to teach. "He that heareth you heareth me;" he commands all who believe in him to hear her, under penalty of being placed with the "heathen and publican;" and promised to be with her to the end of the world. She holds her charter as teacher from him—a charter as infallible as perpetual. The Protestant world at its birth found the Christian sabbath too strongly entrenched to run counter to its existence. It had to acquiesce in the arrangement, thus implying the character and right to change the day, for over three hundred years. The Christian sabbath is, therefore, to this day the acknowledged offspring of the Catholic Church as spouse of the Holy Ghost, without a word of remonstrance from the Protestant world. Those who admit the Bible alone as the teacher and guide in faith and morals, must know that it most emphatically forbids any change in the day, and calls for a perpetual covenant. It is an apostasy from an assumed fixed principle; as self-contradictory, self-stultifying, and consequently as suicidal as it is within the power of language to express.—Geo. Pax, Catholic Rector. A testy and superficial reader wrote us a few days ago, declaring his great disgust that we should bring out such facts as the above from Roman Catholic sources. That they are disturbing to Sunday-keeping Protestants, we freely admit. But they are facts so far as they show that the church and not the Bible is the author of Sunday observance. Being facts they will continue whether Protestants love them or fear them, whether they condemn or commend us for rehearsing them. There is one way of escape, accept the Sabbath and get off from Roman Catholic ground. It may not be a pleasant alternative, but there is no other. To call us bad names for presenting facts does not hurt us nor remove the facts.—Evangel and Sabbath Outlook.