What Will Come by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 27, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 21.

What Will Come.

By Editor

Says a prominent advocate of Sunday laws: "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." We merely quote these words as the expression of a sentiment growingly prevalent among a religio-political class which "will not down." When we said some time ago that one of the absorbing questions in religious and political life would shortly be the Sunday question, people laughed at the idea. But 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. Politicians who see its injustice yield to its 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 ere such methods force upon statute books a general Sunday law, hated by the very men who place it there, but who hope it will prove harmless? But place it there, and union of Church and State follows; Jesus Christ and his Gospel are forsaken for the gospel of force, and the State assumes the place of God over conscience, and becomes anti-christ.