THE "AMERICAN SABBATH."
By W. N. G.
As NO person, and therefore no people, can be said to keep the Sabbath who do violence to the rest of the law (James 2:10), it follows that the "American sabbath" is the lowest grade of Sabbath observance to be found in the world. For proof we submit the following points from the Union Signal, which are amply verified by official statistics and other authorities:— The United States has a standing army of twenty-five thousand men, and so far as we have learned, they killed nobody last year. But in our peaceful (?) hamlets, towns, and villages, on our quiet farms, and in the cities that are the centers of our great philanthropies, there were slaughtered last year seventeen thousand one hundred and seventy-two persons, of whom ten thousand six hundred and fifty-two were murdered, and the rest committed suicide. This is probably the bloodiest record ever made in any country except Turkey and among cannibals. Side by side with this sickening statement put another: The proportion of murders to population steadily increases, and has done so for many years. Dr. W. F. Crafts assures us that in the last thirty years (since 1867), murders, divorces, and liquor sales have increased ten times as fast as the population. Lynchings, labor riots, and municipal corruption have developed to a greater extent than in any other country. Social impurity, by the testimony of a recent convention of physicians, has increased apace, and the sabbath is more attacked and less defended than ever before. Now add the declaration of judges, grand juries, statisticians, chaplains, and wardens of prisons that ninety per cent. of the crimes committed in this country have their origin in strong drink, and is it conceivable that with such a situation confronting, surrounding, pressing in upon us at every inch of space, a vast majority of our people can go on with their regular routine and make no effort to try to meet the cause of the calamity with well-considered, systematic, and unrelenting opposition? To be so constructed mentally that one can "go on his way rejoicing" when he lives in a land where nobody's life is safe because of beer and brandy, is to confess a lapse of mental power, to say nothing of paralysis of conscience and ossification of heart The very fact that this is done proves that as a nation we are drugged. Many professed Christian people seem to think that the remedy for all this lies in stringent Sunday laws enforced by the State. Leading Sunday-law advocates argue that "the moral thermometer of any community is its sabbath observance." Now the States that have no Sunday laws are not guilty of any greater proportion of the foregoing crimes than many States where they have such laws. For instance, staid old Pennsylvania, with its eighteenth-century statute, has had three deaths from prize-fights in the last two months; and Nevada, which passed a special act to authorize the great world's championship fight, has its Sunday law. Then if the morality of a country is to be judged by its Sunday observance, it is fair to judge the Sunday observance by the morality, as shown by statistics and other well-established facts. Logically, then, the "American sabbath," for which we hear so much clamor, is worse than the "continental Sunday," of which we hear so much dread expressed. The proof has yet to be adduced that Sunday laws are in any way a check upon the lengthening criminal record of the last days, in this or any other country. Too many people are deluded with the idea that Sunday laws are an evidence of a Sabbath-keeping people. Too many are deceived by the theory that a civil law on the statute books insures the writing of the law of God in the heart—without which no man can keep the Sabbath, or any other commandment, in a manner acceptable to God. Appeals to secular authority to uphold or enforce religious tenets by civil law are simply appeals to the arm of flesh, ignoring7the power of God, on which alone the commission to proclaim the Gospel is based. "Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help." Ps. 146:3. "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man." Ps. 118:8. Yes, the scripture puts it stronger still: "Thus saith the Lord, Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm." Jer. 17:5.