CLASS LEGISLATION by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jan 23, 1907

CLASS LEGISLATION

By Editor

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE in hour of the California Conference on another page. It meets at 2:30 p.m. The mistake was in the copy furnished us.

OUR STATE LEGISLATORS thruout the country will, in the nature of the case, be compelled to hear much of the appeal for Sunday laws; will they not take a little time to read the other side?

BRETHREN IN THE GOSPEL MINISTRY, why not trust in the power of the Gospel to secure better observance of Sunday? Coercion can not reach hearts. You may compel a man to obey outwardly a law which human beings have no right to enforce. But how have you helped him? He is not attracted to the Gospel. He does not love you more because you have endeavored to make him seem religious. The glory of Protestantism has been that in principle it has held to the absolute non-interference of the civil magistrate in things religious, and the church has held Jesus Christ and His word to be all-sufficient in saving men. Why not preach the Gospel and leave results with God? Is He not worthy of being trusted?

WHEN ONE SO LOVES SELF that he turns from Christ and His word, he is very apt to charge his disaffection or defection to the failures that professors of religion have made. This is a common excuse of unbelievers. They never stop to think of the mistakes and blunders and sins and crimes of the unbelieving ones, or even of themselves, who set up their own opinion as superior to God's word. Granting all the blunders and sins and crimes of those who belong to the ranks of Christianity, yet how small in number they are compared with those who prove false to Christ and His cause. It is natural for men to choose the pleasant paths of least resistance. It is easy to drift with the tide in the do-nothing negatives of life. To move upward, tho Christ furnish all the power, demands manhood.

CLASS LEGISLATION.

It is a deadly poison, says the California Sunday EXTRA SIGNS, which these reform organizations are injecting into our government and body politic. It is deranging and perverting every just principle of liberty and humanity. It is sacrificing man to institutions, principles of right to popular prejudices, right or wrong. That government which exalts in its laws institutions at the expense of human rights, will always and forever be guilty of class legislation and subject to class prejudices, traditions, bickerings, strifes, jealousies, and, eventually, utter ruin. For instance, the so-called "American Sunday" is a CLASS institution, and nothing else. It is a RELIGIOUS class institution. People MAY observe it who will, but they have neither human nor divine right to say that he must observe or honor it who elects otherwise. Nay, more, they have no right to say that HE MUST honor it who elects so to do. The honor or observance is elective; the right of choice is universal, vested in the individual, and dominant over all civil authority whatsoever. The observance or non-observance of the institution is a matter of conscience between the individual and the being he may call God, but it is not a matter with which the State has any right to interfere, except to guard the equal rights of all her citizens and subjects.