PERVERSION OF LAW BY SENATORS.
By Editor
WHILE the recent Railroad Rate Bill was under consideration in the United States Senate, a member offered the following as an amendment: It shall be unlawful for any common carrier engaged in interstate commerce to operate as such interstate common carrier for compensation any steam-propelled vehicle of transportation of passengers or freight between sunrise and sunset on the Sabbath day. In support of the proposed amendment the member said: "I want to read verses 8, 9, 10, and 11 of the twentieth chapter of Exodus, so that when a senator, if there is a senator here who has not read this, comes to vote on this amendment, if he votes against it, he may know that he is voting against one of the Ten Commandments, and one that is also germane to this bill." Then he read: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it." Being asked if he would stop telegraphic messages and mails on Sunday, too, the senator replied: "I would stop the whole business and let everybody rest. I would let the telegraph operators and the railroad employees—the men who run the trains on Sunday and never get a Sunday and never know what a Sunday is—rest. I would stop all those trains. I would allow the train crews and laborers a rest of one day in seven, as commanded by the Almighty. That is what the Almighty, through Moses, commanded, and I would give Moses a fair chance in this." This is a specimen of the confusion that arises when men undertake to legislate religious institutions into the laws of the state. When senators quote the law of God concerning one day of the week as applying to another day, they are treating that law in a manner that they would not for a moment tolerate in respect to their own laws. And no court would so construe a state law. When men in the national Legislature undertake to enforce by statute the dogmas of the Papacy, through perversion of the law of God, the result must soon be Babylon. In the instance above cited, however, to the credit of the majority, the project failed.