SUNDAY ENFORCEMENT NEWS AND COMMENT.
By Editor
At the beginning of a term of the district court at Roswell, N. M., recently, Judge Wm. H. Pope, in his charge to the grand jury, told them that he wanted them to pay particular attention to any violators of the Sunday-closing law. ON a charge of pursuing their avocation on the Sabbath, 200 members of a construction crew of the Big Four Railroad Company, in charge of C. A. Placquette, superintendent of the Chicago division, were arrested at Lafayette, Ind., on Sunday, November 12, while laying a switch from Main to Alabama Streets. "FOR doing carpentering work on a house on Sunday," two Russian Jews were arrested in Brooklyn, N. Y., November 19, and the next day were arraigned in the police court. On pleading not guilty, they were held in $300 bail for examination. STRICT orders in regard to enforcing the Sunday-closing law were given by Chief of Police Vinzant of Jacksonville, Fla., on the morning of Sunday, November 5, and as a result, two arrests were made during the day. Chief Vinzant says that he intends to see that the Sunday-closing law is rigidly enforced, and that all people found with their places of business open will be promptly arrested and made to appear before the municipal court for trial. THE Sunday agitation has reached Pietermaritzburg, Natal, Africa, where there has been a great agitation. Brother George Claver, representing the International Tract Society, writes that there has been an extended discussion of the subject in the papers, and the people have been hearing both sides. The "Appeal to Ministers," which was widely circulated in this country, has been revised and adapted to the situation there. IN Brooklyn, N. Y., a man was arrested for selling half a pound of coffee on Sunday. Two others were arrested for working on a house. The men were discharged by Magistrate Voorhees, who asked the arresting officers why they didn't arrest the employees of the Transit Company for running street-cars on Sunday. It is refreshing, in these days of discrimination, to find an occasional official who deems the rights of the poor equal to those of the rich. ACCORDING to press despatches from Japan, one of the reasons given by government officers and the better class of Japanese citizens for the attacks upon and destruction of several Christian churches and schools during the late riots in Tokyo and elsewhere over the peace terms, was that "there has been local feeling over the efforts of the 'Christians' to secure the closing of business houses on Sunday." To go among the heathen with a compulsory religion purporting to be the religion of Christ, is a decided misrepresentation of the Master and His cause. Nothing could be more farcical than to set up an institution which Christ never recognized, and ask the heathen to not only accept it as Christian, but to enforce it by their civil law. Christ has not sent His ambassadors into the world for any such purpose.