Relics of the Dark Ages
By Editor
A POLICE judge in Richmond, Virginia, according to a recent dispatch, has decided that "Sunday music in hotels and restaurants, and Sunday shoe-shines, were unlawful." In the same decision, the judge held that the "manufacture and sale of ice, sale of milk, operation of street cars, telephones, telegraph, and cold storage plants, manufacture of bakery goods, cleaning of railroad cars, and operating of express companies," are "necessities," and persons arrested for work in such enterprises were freed. It is difficult for the ordinary layman to understand why shining shoes would not be necessary, and cleaning railroad cars would be a necessity. Many other similar inconsistencies could be pointed out in this decision. Aside from the question of religion involved, there is not one that can point out why an act that is perfectly legitimate and commendable upon one day of the week should be unlawful and wrong upon another day. All Sunday laws are a relic of the old church-and-state régime, when the plan was in vogue of undertaking to regulate a man's religion, as well as his civil conduct, by state law. All of the efforts, in these times, to revive and extend the operation of Sunday observance by the force of municipal, state, or national law is a revival of the spirit that would seek to compel men to believe and act as you do — otherwise they are to be branded as heretics and outlaws. We have been earnestly taught, during the past generation, that our civilization was such that we could never have any more religious persecution; that religious bigotry, so far as concerned its being able to do anything in the world, was a thing wholly of the past. We had also been taught that our civilization was so great that we could never have any more wars. The European war that is now in progress has shattered into atoms the theory of civilization preventing the bloody combat. We will soon see that our civilization is also powerless to save us from the persecutions of the religious zealots. The readers of this journal know that for more than forty years, we have been consistently teaching, from the prophecies, that some of the greatest wars the world has ever witnessed would come within this generation. We have also taught, for the like period, that the worst religious despotism that has ever been formed upon this planet, will arise just at the close of time. And furthermore, we have taught that the very center of this great religious despotism would be the requirement, by civil statute, to observe Sunday. Men used to laugh at our position concerning war. They are not laughing so much today. They are still laughing at our position on the subject of a religious despotism. We will soon see that the Bible prophecies concerning the religious tyranny of these last days will be just as literally fulfilled as have been the predictions concerning war. Men will conclude that the war spirit of the age, as well as other evils, is the result of the lack of religion. All the great religious bodies of the world, both Catholic and Protestant, will unite to correct this evil by a world-wide religious combine. But this modern religious combine, like all its predecessors, will produce only persecution and indescribable suffering. The power that will break the great delusion will be the second coming of Christ Himself. Governments cannot compel righteousness. The kingdom of heaven will never come through the gateway of politics. The gospel converts and transforms the life. Such work cannot be accomplished by force. The idea that nations are to be gradually absorbed into the kingdom of Christ through amendments of constitutions, and by religious enactments, finds no warrant in the inspired declarations of the word of God.