Note and Comment by Editor

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · Jul 24, 1913

Note and Comment

By Editor

Compelling Others to Work on Sunday

The Congregationalist and Christian World of June 13, 1913, expresses sympathy for the men and women in this country who are compelled to work on Sunday. It says:—

The thousands who use Sundays for excursions make other thousands work. The thousands who insist on Sunday newspapers make thousands of boys deliver them on Sunday. Some years ago an article in a Scottish magazine on the moral side of golf, called attention to the growing custom of taking boys to the golf links Sundays for the whole day, thus depriving them of religious training. Last week the General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church took up this question with great earnestness. In its decidedly emphatic protest against Sabbath-breaking it asserted that "one hundred thousand caddies are kept from Sunday-school by golf." Not long ago the pastor of a suburban church complained that the golf links were depleting his Sunday-school.

It seems to us that the whole question of Sunday work on the part of men and women engaged on public utilities turns upon their allegiance to the right as they view the right. By no system of slavery or by no process of law are they forced to engage in Sunday labor. They do this only as they value their position and the salaries received above the dictates of any conscientious regard which they may have for the day. Acting on this principle, the three worthies would never have braved the fiery furnace, nor Daniel the ferocity of the lions; Peter would never have stood in bold defiance of the authority of the Jewish Sanhedrin, nor Luther of the papal hierarchy; nor would the millions of martyrs who fell have welcomed the punishments meted out to them in preference to what the world offered for a denial of their faith.

We know of thousands of men and women who have preferred surrendering their positions to violating their conscientious convictions in laboring on the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath of the Lord. But while this has meant pecuniary loss, they have not been brought to penury. God has answered to their faith in affording them honorable means of subsistence. What he has done for these he will do for every honest man who stands true to his religious convictions.

We fear that the zealotry of some preachers of the gospel for restrictive Sunday legislation is indicated in the closing sentence quoted above. The golf links run opposition to the pulpit. This was the plea by which restrictive Sunday laws were sought in the fourth century. The clergy sought to suppress the theaters for the reason that they drew the worshipers away from the churches. As a matter of fact, when we recognize that the Sunday sabbath has no foundation in the Scriptures of Truth, but little appeal can be made to the conscientious convictions of men and women who are prone to use that day for labor or pleasure.

How much better it would be to cast aside these man-made religious institutions, cease human efforts to bring man into conformity to some standard of right, adopt for our day of rest the day which God has made sacred, and then seek by moral suasion and religious conviction to lead men to a conscientious observance of the same.