Opinions on Sunday-Law Conviction
"There can be but one opinion upon this decision among all liberal minded men. It is odious sophistry, unworthy of the age in which we live, and under it an American citizen has been condemned to spend the rest of his days in a dungeon, unless he shall stoop to deny the dictates of his own conscience, and dishonor his own manhood."—New York Commercial Advertiser. "The keeper of Saturday has an undoubted moral right to his convictions. More than this, his legal right to observe Saturday as a holy day and Sunday as a secular day, ought not to be called into question in free America by any civil authority. It would not be in doubt for a moment were it not for the existence of legal anachronisms that should have gone out with the witchcraft laws, or, at the latest, with George the Third."—Boston Daily Globe. "It seems absolutely incredible that in this age of enlightenment, in these free United States, men should suffer and families be plunged into sorrow because they have exercised a right of conscience guaranteed to them by the Constitution of their country. The sooner a test is appealed to the highest tribunal in the land for adjudication, the better for the honor of Tennessee and every state ridden by bad laws, passed in violation of individual liberty."—Chicago Daily Globe. "Not being able to leave his crops unworked for two days in the week, Mr. King plowed them on Sunday, after having kept the Sabbath the day before. He was arrested under the Sunday law; and in order to make it effective against him, it was alleged that his work on a farm on Sunday created a public nuisance. On this entirely untenable ground he has been harassed from court to court. He was a poor man, but has been supported by the friends of religious liberty. Mr. King has been greatly wronged, but his only remedy at law is under the law and constitution of Tennessee. It appears that for the present his remedy is denied him; and this being the case, he has no better course than to submit to the oppression and go to prison—to the convict camp, if it suits the convenience of his persecutors to send him there."—St. Louis Republic. "The principle involved is simple, and its application plain. The state has nothing to do with religion, except to protect every citizen in his religious liberty. It has no more right to prescribe the religious observance of sabbaths and holy days than to order sacraments and to ordain creeds."—New York World. "So long as the labor of Adventists on Sunday does not interfere with the rights of the Mosaic and Puritanic people on the same day, the prosecution of them seems neither more nor less than persecution."—Chicago Tribune. "People are asking if we are returning to the days of Cotton Mather or the Spanish Inquisition, that faithful, law-abiding citizens must be fined or driven from the country when their only offense consists in quietly carrying out the convictions of conscience."—Louisville Courier-Journal.