The Importance of the Sabbath Question
By W.
SOME years ago a prominent advocate of Sunday laws said: "Approached on any side, a discussion of sabbath [Sunday] desecration opens up every living topic agitating the public mind." "In the Sunday question centers the problem of law enforcement and civic reform." These words are quoted as the expression of a sentiment growingly prevalent among a religio-political class, which "will not down." We have again and again said, during a period of years, that one of the absorbing questions in religious and political life would be the Sunday question, and people laughed at the idea. We now see the beginning of the end. All the so-called civic, municipal, Christian citizenship, and temperance reforms are more or less tied up with the Sunday-law question. Pressure is brought to bear on politicians, or men seeking political preferment everywhere; and many of them who see its injustice, yield to pressure. Political parties make all sorts of promises to catch the Sunday-law vote, and the Sunday-law man pledges his candidate. How long will it be before such methods force upon statute-books a general Sunday law, hated by the very men who place it there, or under the Initiative placed there by men who are deceived, but who hope that the law will prove harmless? But, reader, place it there, and union of church and state is accomplished. Jesus Christ and His gospel are forsaken for the gospel of force, and the state assumes the place of God over conscience, and in doing that very thing, becomes antichrist. W.