Underlying Principles of Law
By G. D. Ballou
CIVIL law is an authoritative expression of human rights. Man has a right to defend his own or the property of another, and a full right to arrest the career of the despoiler. He has a right to defend his own or the life of another against any attack and he is in duty bound at least to endeavor to restrain and confine any person who becomes dangerous to the lives of others. Failing to do this, he becomes under some circumstances partaker in the crime committed. He has a right to defend the chastity of his own or another's family against all attacks. He has a right to defend his own or the character of another. These and other rights associated with them exist before all law, and law is but a civilized agreement in regard to an expression of these rights. The right to defend and protect includes all law and all police regulations. The questions of relationship to God are not a matter for human regulation. I have no right, nor has the other man, to tell any man how he shall use any portion of his time or life for which he is alone accountable to God, so long as he observes the rights of others before referred to. I have no personal right to regulate any man's conduct toward any day of rest or worship, nor has any man a personal right to regulate my conduct in reference to a day of rest or a time for worship. He has a right to defense against disturbance, so have I, whether it be rest for worship or rest for recuperation. Now when we elect men to go to the halls of legislation to formulate laws, we delegate to them the rights which we each possess, and when they make laws protecting life and property and reputation and chastity, they are simply doing for every man what each in himself has a right to do if left to himself. But when this same Legislature undertakes to make laws regulating our conduct toward a day of rest or worship, except for the equal protection of all in their personal right to rest or worship when, where, or how they please, we begin to inquire whence they derive this right. The individuals whom they represent had no rights in this respect to delegate. They dared not tell another how to rest or when to rest for worship. So this Sunday legislation becomes a matter of usurpation pure and simple,—a mere matter of a few priests or self-appointed promoters of some religious belief, bringing to bear influences on legislators to induce them to overstep the bounds of their delegated authority and thus force some of the community into a course of conduct for which there was only a usurped human authority. This was the origin of all religious and Sunday legislation in civil government at a time when the “divine right of kings” was interpreted and controlled by priests and prelates. And these religious laws have been copied into the more civilized codes of modern times without stopping to question the source of their authority. In the very nature of the case they have no right to existence in the statute books of a civilized representative government. Let this be stated in other words: Of all the twenty millions of men in the United States of America, the personal right to command other people in regard to the observance of a day of rest either for worship or for physical ends is represented for each by zero. Now find the sum of twenty million zeroes and you get simply zero. So when their representatives meet in legislative halls to formulate laws for the people, their delegated power and rights to make laws concerning a day of compulsory rest for any purpose is represented by nothing greater than zero. If men could get the idea that nothing to nothing makes nothing, even to a million nothings, they would understand the utter lack of authority for legislation concerning a rest day, and they would sense the utter nothingness on which all this modern furor for religious legislation rests. Limitations of Civil Power.
None of all those who clamor for these laws dares claim the right to command his neighbor in this matter as he would in any of the matters of right mentioned in the opening of this article. The grand jury that indicts for Sunday labor, the district attorney and witness who prosecute, the jury that renders the verdict of guilty, the judge that sentences, and the supreme court that sustains the verdict,—any and all these are as devoid of any personal right to command Sunday rest as they would be to compel attendance at the Lord's Supper or to order a man baptized. But either or any one of them would have a perfect right to physically restrain a man from violating life or property or any other human right. How hollow and contemptible is the civilized force that permits this game of Sunday laws to be revived and played in this century of progress, to the disgrace and discomfiture of everything that may be called Christian. The Master said, "If any man hear My words and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." But these short-sighted persons seem of late to be developing an anxiety to please their religious constituents by getting everything prepared, precedents all established, machinery of the law all in running order, so as to place men who have the courage of their convictions to follow the word of God in the role of outlaws and if possible to subject them to fines and imprisonment. The spirit of intolerance is not yet dead, and no amount of logic and appeal or of lessons from the past seems sufficient to antidote its baneful virus. We have seen men become angry and be greatly disturbed because some one worked on Sunday, but it was not a righteous indignation because there was no right infringed in the matter, and possibly at the same time the wrathful individual might be riding on a Sunday railroad train or Sunday street-car or riding in a Sunday livery rig and regarding his own conduct and surroundings with something akin to admiration. This has been the trouble all thru the ages: somebody has been angry because some one else differed from him and did not respect his religious opinions enough to adopt them but rather showed a disposition to exercise his own God-given privileges. Cain took this matter in his own hands. His sin and condemnation are on record. The more modern method is to create laws in the civil code which will condemn differences of religious beliefs and then in the sequel to excuse themselves and their church from all responsibility when the law is executed. If all modern Christians were as tolerant of others as they demand others to be toward them, they would not be desirous to set in motion legal methods which will cause a repetition of all the cruel persecutions of the past. It is but a generation or so since the ancestors of the leading religious bodies were undergoing the greatest indignity and persecutions just because the principles of personal religious freedom were not regarded, which gives to every man full freedom before God to worship unmolested at any time or in any manner he may choose and not be compelled to honor the other man's religion further than to scrupulously refrain from in any way molesting the quiet of his worship. But how soon are the lessons of history forgotten! If some of our zealous Protestant religionists were compelled to bare the head or bend the knee when the Catholic bishop of some South American diocese was passing or take the flings and jeers and perhaps the stones of the mob, it might have a slightly sobering effect on their unwonted religious zeal. The appeal of the Methodist Clergy of Chicago in 1894 to high Catholic dignitaries and even the pope himself in reference to the then existing intolerance manifested by that church toward Protestants in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, asking for the same religious freedom for Protestants in those countries that Roman Catholics enjoy in this country, was treated with silence by some of those dignitaries and with evasive replies by others. This experience ought to shame Methodists at least into a proper sense of the rights of that minority in this country who desire to obey the fourth command of the law of God as all Christians profess to obey the other precepts of that law. A sense of decent regard for personal rights or compliance with the Golden Rule must prevail or we shall be compelled to conclude that Christianity has been replaced by Popery. Let men of clear heads and true hearts tremble at future prospects, and prepare to sound the warning against all intolerance and usurpation.