“DECEIVING AND BEING DECEIVED.”
STRANGE to say, it is a Baptist paper, the leading Baptist paper (the Examiner), that calls it “wise legislation” to enforce Sunday observance by State law; and this, too, “whether it be based upon the written law of God as declared in the fourth commandment of the Decalogue, or on the unwritten law, equally divine, which makes a hebdominal rest-day essential to man’s physical and intellectual well-being.” Basing a Sunday law on the fourth commandment is not very good Baptist doctrine, unless Baptists are prepared to abandon their old-time watchword, “Thus saith the Lord,” and are also prepared to abandon their whilom antagonism to religious legislation by the civil power. The fourth commandment could not more explicitly declare that “the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work.” There is a “Thus saith the Lord” for a weekly rest day; and it is not the divine purpose to make it merely “a hebdominal rest day, essential to man’s physical and intellectual well-being.” That is merely incidental; for it is “essential to man’s physical and intellectual well-being” to keep all the commandments of God. The purpose of the Sabbath is primarily a day of spiritual rest, a commemoration of God’s rest (which was a spiritual rest) after His six days of creation. He sanctified that day, that ever afterward, on its weekly recurrence, it should be observed as His memorial. Man’s physical rest did not come into the question at all. He was not to labor on that day, because it was a “holy day,” and he was to “keep it holy.” To make that a basis for setting apart another day by State law, on which all men should be compelled to rest whether they want to or not, whether they need to or not, is not only illogical from the standpoint of the commandment, but it is absurd from the standpoint of man’s physical needs. As far as the physical argument goes, men do themselves ten times as much harm by excessive, intemperate work on the six working days and nights as they would in seven days of temperate work in the hours allotted by nature for work. Nature designed that men should work by day and rest by night; but they insist on turning night into day, and many times the day into night. Then instead of reforming in the way that would prove a real physical benefit, some misguided people imagine it would be a good reformation to have the State add something to the law of God. They would substitute another day for the Sabbath, add to it the idea of an essential for physical rest, and compel everybody to rest on it. If men want a day of rest, all they have to do is to obey the law of God. “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” and there is the rest that God has provided; for if they do this through the week they will live temperately every day, and be benefited temporally and spiritually. If they will not obey God, they can not be benefited by imposing upon them the formality of an imposed rest. If the “reformers” really want to give merely a physical rest to laboring men, and to curb the evil of the saloons to the minimum without destroying them altogether, they could accomplish ten times as much by having work restricted to the daytime, and having the saloons wholly closed all night, than they can by any semi-religious Sunday laws. But all these Sunday-closing propositions are simply schemes for enforced Sunday observance. While their champions talk about “physical rest” and “civil Sunday,” they have put on record the doctrine that “if you take religion out of the day, you take the rest out.” The same principle is promulgated in this form: “You will in vain endeavor to secure the enforcement of a day of rest unless you enforce it as a day of worship; and unless it be founded on religious reasons, it can not be long maintained.” These sentiments indicate unmistakably the ultimate expectation of those who are leading out in the matter of Sunday and other religious legislation. In the course of this movement, its advocates have also cautiously taken the ground that “in this thing you must not ask for too much at first. Ask just what public sentiment will bear, and when you get that, ask for more.” Also, in advocating a national Sunday law, a leader of the campaign, who is still foremost in the persistent effort to commit the general government to the principle of religious legislation, said: “We will take a quarter of a loaf, half a loaf, or a whole loaf. If the government should do nothing more than forbid the opening of the post-offices at church hours, it would be a national tribute to the value of religion, and would lead to something more satisfactory.” In face of these avowed purposes, really papal in principle, yet advocated by professed Protestants, it is almost alarming to hear the organ of a people noted in time past as the standard-bearers of religious liberty referring to Sunday enactments as “wise legislation.” Surely it is an evidence that the terrible deceptions and delusions predicted of the last days are already doing their deadly work.