FANATICAL VIOLATION OF PERSONAL RIGHTS BY LEGISLATION.
By Charles W. Smiley
WHEN God endowed every man with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, He forbade all men, all churches, all governments, to seek to abridge my perfect liberty to benefit or to injure my life in any and every way conceivable. The only interference that kings or policemen may use is the minimum necessary to keep me from restricting other people in their perfect liberty. Even a human parent lets its child do itself a harm, first having uttered a kindly warning. Only by the experience of the consequences of folly are we surely made wise. God has not provided as above recklessly, but by His providence can and does shield me from many "evils" that shortsighted and too self-opinionated men seek to legislate out of existence. The better my relations with God, the less can I be harmed by men and the less do I need legal or police protection. Only the decay of real religious experience prompts men to enact so-called sumptuary laws, such as those relating to Sabbath, to liquor, to chastity, to insanity, and to all immorality. Men restrained by such violence as law and court offer are still just as godless at heart, and will always find other ways to exercise their ends. Faster than government can legislate against the trusts, cunning lawyers find new ways of attaining the evil ends. An awful insanity has seized upon churchmen's minds tempting them to withdraw trust from God's providence and to replace it with trust in the providence of immoral policemen and sheriffs. Preachers can be seen lobbying beside thieves, grafters, and godless politicians. They seek public sentiment which shall also trust in laws man-made to the exclusion of trust in different but God-made laws. An external respect for Easter, or for Friday, or for Sunday is only an offense against God, for only the heart's respect goes at all with Him. A Berkeley editor, called Christian, says: "The law protects the weak and dependent man against the greed and avarice of the employer. This Sunday-rest law is in the interest of the laboring man." Now, whoever knows the most elementary principles of divine government knows that is not so. All the protection any weak and dependent person needs from the greed and avarice of others comes alone in God's providence guiding the every footstep and every motive of those who put an undivided trust in God alone. I can illustrate this over all the pages of that editor's paper if he dare let me do so. To invite any weak and dependent man to look for one instant to a man-made law is to invite him toward godlessness. Only when that man or that editor is out of harmony with holy truth will he feel the least need of aid from any policeman or politician. If they study the working of laws already in force they can see how everywhere laws fail of enforcement against the cunning and get enforced unjustly quite often. Christianity has learned to trust to money, money, money, and thinks that God's truth can advance in men's hearts only when money-paid hirelings talk their opinions to men. Seeing that unlimited money does not make men truly good, preachers now turn political schemers, hoping by adding violence to money that things may go more as they conceive that things ought to go. They have lost the knowledge of how John Wesley, without any money from his preaching, without church property, obliged to preach in fields under rain-clouds and hot suns, without thinking once in all his life of eighty-eight years about procuring legislation as an aid, yet saved more sinners than all the preachers, all the church money, and all the politics of California are doing, year for year. I was born, named, reared, educated and taught as a Methodist. The editor mentioned edits a Methodist paper. I take to heart his utterance on Feb. 14, 1907, which was:15"No normal man outside of the Advent fold could be induced to believe that a Sunday law which prevents employers from working their employees seven days in a week does in any way interfere with the personal rights of any one." I once held a Methodist local-preacher's license, and could get it renewed now if I desired. So I must be "normal" even in that editor's eyes unless all who differ with him are abnormal, and he hardly pretends that. Not only do I consider such a law an interference with personal rights, but I can get a hundred graduates of Methodist colleges, who surely must be normal, to agree to the same proposition. Our Berkeley editor not merely fails to enlighten his mind by God's grace as to the iniquity of such legislation, but he makes the above reckless assertion little suspecting how easily and how completely his miscalculation of the normal mind can be exposed. Furthermore, if he will candidly discuss the matter with me, for, you know, I am not one of those benighted Adventists whose "responsibility is limited." I believe I can show him that HIS, not THEIR, "contention is so utterly absurd, so morally blind, so intellectually dreary," that he will be glad to abandon it, and substitute a faith in God alone, which will not shrink the pressed by every foe; that will not murmur nor complain, but, in the hour of grief over men's sins, will lean alone on God, and eschew politics. CHAS. W. SMILEY, A. M.
Berkeley, Cal., March 9, 1907.