NOT A TEMPERANCE REFORM.
By Editor
A copy of the American Issue, of Columbus, Ohio, comes to us filled with accounts of the arresting, fining, and imprisoning of saloon-keepers who had sold liquor on Sunday in that State. The Signs of the Times is an advocate of temperance everywhere and all the time; but it finds no cause of jubilation in a temperance movement which centers around Sunday. The saloon is a menace to life and morality every hour that it is allowed to run. A rational man would not think of chaining up a tiger one day in seven, and giving him the freedom of the city all the rest of the week. It would be just as sensible to do that as to work for the suppression of the "Sunday saloon." If the Anti-saloon League of Ohio confines its work within such limits, conducts it on such a basis, it might better disband. God asks no human arm to "steady the ark" of His law. Much less will He give His sanction and blessing to any power or organization which stretches forth a human arm to displace His law by substituting for it a human ordinance, supporting it, and compelling its recognition, by civil power. Numerous organizations are doing to-day. Every law against Sunday "desecration" is framed and enforced upon that basis; but it is not of God, and God's blessing is not in it or with it. s.