Sunday-Law Agitation in Missouri.
MR. JOHN S. WIGHTMAN, of Kansas City, secretary of the Religious Liberty Department of the Central Union Conference, writes of conditions in that state as follows: "Perhaps nowhere else in the American states are more strenuous efforts being put forth to compel the observance of Sunday than in the state of Missouri. Resulting from wholesale prosecution of theatrical people for Sunday 'labor,' wide-spread agitation in pulpit and press has resulted; and energetic zeal seems to recognize no bounds or limits that may not be reached; and the question has now gone so far as to reach, in a way, the politics of the commonwealth, and one member of the Judiciary has announced himself as a candidate for governor and in his public speech-making and candidacy has frankly admitted seeking the nomination upon his public record of compulsory Sunday observance. No stronger decision was ever made in the old-time sabbatical edicts and laws than the Sunday-law decision made by this jurist in his Kansas City court last January; and in a public speech made at Richmond, Mo., recently, he has stated that if elected governor, he will appoint police commissioners who will see to it that the same rigid enforcement of Sunday laws now obtaining in Kansas City would be extended to all of the cities of the state. "A great religious wave is now sweeping over the American people; among other reforms it advocates and demands that of sabbath observance; and legislators, courts, and municipal officers—in the majority, at least—seem inclined to, and do, lend the aid of the purely civil power to the extension of the religious sphere; and thus, step by step, surely and steadily, we advance to the time when religious legislation will be the rule instead of the exception, and persecution become an inevitable result. In Missouri the issue is unmistakable." And in Missouri and everywhere else the results are unmistakable—inevitable ruin of church and state.