A CORRESPONDENT of the Examiner writing in reference to the Roman Catholic Church and the State of New Jersey, says:—
The State has no right to inquire into religious belief that it may defend it and propagate it. The State has no right to take public funds that it may teach a church catechism or celebrate the mass. The State has no right, by its strong arm, to make any one remain in the confines of the Romish Church. If the Romish Church should erect buildings, and pay teachers from its own funds, it could not have a more distinctively church reformatory than it has to-day in the New Jersey State reform school. Policies and politics have turned their backs upon fundamental principles. In this little State there is a virtual alliance of Church and State; the Commonwealth has become an annex of the Church. When the various religious bodies of the State entered their formal protest against this public outrage, the statesmen of all grades dwindled into politicians and had no ears. In Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, the same attack has been made, with partial success. . . . Rome, as a political institution, making attack upon the foundation beliefs of the Republic, must be opposed and defeated. The people must be trained up to this high resolve; the public schools shall not be changed into parochial schools, the State institutions shall not be changed into church institutions.
These would be most creditable expressions if only they were given as general principles and not as partisan utterances. They are principles and apply with the same force to the Protestant Church as a whole, or to any denomination of that Church, as they do to the Roman Catholic Church. Those who give such reasons as these for their opposition to Roman Catholic domination must acknowledge them as of universal application, or confess themselves6partisan denominationalists engaged in a contest for temporal success only. This is what they are. Let them confess it! Certainly the State may not rightfully propagate any religious belief, or inquire into it with a view to discriminate either for or against it,—whether it be Roman Catholic or Protestant. The State has no more right to use the public funds to teach the Protestant religion in the New Jersey State reform school, or the Indian schools, or any other schools, than to teach the Roman Catholic religion in the same schools. The State has no more right to enforce the “American Sunday” than the Roman Catholic Sunday, or the Continental Sunday. The State may not be a partisan of any religious belief, or any religious denomination, or any form of religion. Those who undertake a partisanship in religious affairs and attempt to make them questions of political policy show themselves by this to have turned their backs on the fundamental principles of civil justice and religious truth.
W. H. M.
Dr. Edward Thompson, the Pacific Coast Secretary of the American Sabbath Union, holds up California as an awful example of a State without a Sunday law. He is reported as saying at the annual convention of the Union just held at Des Moines, Iowa, that “during the nine years since California repealed her Sunday law her population had increased 30 per cent. and her crime 80 per cent. In other words that the repeal of the Sunday law manufactured criminals.”
When Dr. Thompson returns to California he may be asked to substantiate such statements as these. If they are not true they should not be made. If crime has increased in this proportion it will not assist in remedying it to refer the fact to a fallacious cause.
In reference to the Christian Statesman, and its editorial management, the Pittsburg Times has the following:—
“The Rev. David McAllister, D. D., left for Philadelphia last night to complete arrangements to again assume control of the Christian Statesman, in company with the Rev. T. P. Stevenson. These two Reformed Presbyterian ministers have had charge of the Statesman ever since it was founded by Dr. McAllister, twenty-five years ago. About a month ago the Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts secured control of the sheet, and became managing editor.
“The paper has always been the organ of the National Reform Association. There was some doubt expressed among the leaders of that organization about the propriety of making the change in management. A week after it was announced, notices of discontinuances of subscriptions began pouring in. The subscribers were mostly members of the Reform Association. The matter soon took such a shape that it became necessary to do something to7prevent an actual division in the ranks. The old management of the paper was appealed to, and to-day matters will be arranged in Philadelphia, and an attempt made to smooth over the trouble.
“Mr. Crafts, who is about to retire from his brief career as head of the Association organ is well known in western Pennsylvania, where he has done considerable speaking at intervals for the Sabbatarians.”
Conflicting Opinions.
By A. F. Ballenger
THE following letters, both from public men of North Carolina, who profess the Protestant Christian religion, were recently received by the International Tract Society of Chicago. The parties have each received THE AMERICAN SENTINEL, through the Society, and the letters express the opinions of each as to the correctness of the position taken by THE SENTINEL.
I have read THE SENTINEL, with special interest, and I agree with it that the Church and State are separate bodies, and that the State has no right to interfere with the Church or to enact any law to restrain any individual from what he conscientiously believes. I believe it is entirely between the individual and God whether that individual works on Sunday or not. I believe in keeping Sunday, as a sacred holiday, and feel it my duty to teach others the same, but I do not believe that the State should enact any law to restrain others to my religious belief.
Yours of the 13th asking my views on the position taken by your paper, THE AMERICAN SENTINEL, duly to hand. I will unhesitatingly say, after examining your paper, that I have no sympathy whatever for your position on religious liberty, Sabbath observance, etc. I think that the second charge preferred against Socrates (corrupting the morals of the youth) would be very applicable to you. And I will forewarn you now that unless you change your position, sooner or later you will find yourself among the demons of the lower world crying out to Abraham to send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool your tongues.
The path of the reformer is strewn with many thorns and a few roses; but the roses, by the way, are not his inspiration nor should the thorns discourage him. Inspired by a love for truth, and urged on by Duty’s call, he does not linger to be praised nor does he falter when blamed. It is, however, a sad commentary on the intolerance of the human heart that, Protestant Christian Americans, standing on the threshold of the twentieth century, with all history open before them, under the focused light of the world’s civilization, should bring the charge against the advocates of Roger Williams’ principles of the entire separation of Church and State, that they are corruptors of the morals of the youth, and promise them a place in an eternal burning hell.
A. F. BALLENGER.
A MASS meeting has been called in Chicago for the evening of February 28, under the auspices of the American Secular Union, to protest against closing the World's Fair on Sunday.
A VERMONT court has decided that the holder of an accident insurance policy who is injured while hunting on Sunday can not recover on his policy, because of having received the injury while violating the Sunday laws of the State.
It can immediately be seen how far such a decision as this might be made to carry, in denying legal remedies to those who dissent from religious forms which the civil law may recognize.
THERE is an organization called the “United Christian Commission in the Interest of the Army and Navy.” This organization, which seems in its inception to have been an exceedingly praiseworthy one, met in executive session at Washington, some days ago, to discuss measures to be urged upon Congress in reference to the religious branch of the military and naval service. As an adjunct to this Senator Peffer has introduced a bill to increase the number of chaplains.
The American Sabbath Union is developing great activity in Michigan; a new paper called the Michigan Sabbath Watchman, has been started in Grand Rapids, and a virulent, as well as active campaign, is in progress. The Religious Liberty Association is issuing large editions of tracts particularly adapted to combating the errors advanced by these mistaken enthusiasts. It is to be hoped that all who can use this literature to advantage will write to the Michigan office of the Association, given at the head of this column, for such as they can distribute to advantage.
At a notable gathering recently held in this city for the purpose of furthering the interests of the World's Fair, no reference was made to the question of Sunday closing; but in an interview with a reporter for the Mail and Express, in response to the question, “How about opening the Exposition on Sundays?” Thomas W. Palmer, President of the commission, replied, “That depends on the will of the American people. We have received large petitions from various parts of the country asking that the gates be closed on Sunday. We have not received a single petition asking that the gates be opened on the Sabbath.”
It is noticeable that there is in this no suggestion of the question being decided upon principle, and not even upon “the will of the American people” only as expressed.
THE compulsion by which Remenyi, the violinist, was converted to Connecticut Christianity for one Sunday has brought out no little comment from the press. The Herald expresses a sound legal view of the matter when it says: “It may be doubted whether any State has a right to interfere with the running of through trains across its borders. The train service from Massachusetts to New York, through Connecticut, is interstate commerce, and the courts have repeatedly held that such commerce is beyond the control of a State. Only Congress has the constitutional right to regulate it.”
The same course is being taken in Baltimore to evade the enforcement of Sunday laws against liquor selling, which has been used elsewhere,—the organization of “social clubs.” These are liable to become worse sink-holes of corruption than the saloons themselves. The law will never do away with intemperance or lessen its evil, materially, while the attempt is made from the standpoint of a moral or religious reform. If undertaken properly, as a purely civil matter, the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors could be stopped within any given time which the law might see fit to set.
On the Sunday closing of the World's Fair the Chicago Herald expresses itself thus forcibly: “If a hint be given from headquarters that the Fair will be closed totally on Sundays there will go off a protest to make all its beams ring. There will also be an eager rush for stock in that waiting syndicate to buy up the Sunday trade of the liquor saloons, if they be declared the chief educational places to be had in Chicago during the World's Fair Sundays.”
NATIONAL
By R. C. Porter; A. F. Ballenger
Religious Liberty Association
DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES.
We believe in the religion taught by Jesus Christ.
We believe in temperance, and regard the liquor traffic as a curse to society.
We believe in supporting the civil government, and submitting to its authority.
We deny the right of any civil government to legislate on religious questions.
We believe it is the right, and should be the privilege, of every man to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience.
We also believe it to be our duty to use every lawful and honorable means to prevent religious legislation by the civil government; that we and our fellow-citizens may enjoy the inestimable blessings of both religious and civil liberty.
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A. F. BALLENGER SECRETARY.
CRUDEN'S CONCORDANCE,
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GINN'S CLASSICAL ATLAS—4to, cloth, $2.50. This work contains 23 colored maps, which were projected and executed by the late A. Keith Johnson, with a complete index.
It is worthy of note that among the different insane and devilish things unearthed by the effort to identify the bomb-thrower, whose deadly intentions toward Russell Sage recoiled upon himself, was the asserted existence of a bomb-throwing organization "of a religious character" which, it was declared, "would be in ten years the largest and most influential in the country." That such an element of horror as this may yet become an active factor in the fanatical religious contest now brewing is not impossible.
MISSIONARIES writing from Japan report the question of the Sunday closing of the World's Fair as a subject of discussion there, and urge that the course which is taken will have great influence in that country. Certainly, it will have great influence everywhere, and those who are pressing the agitation have no understanding how world-wide it will be, nor how eternal in its lasting results. They know not what they do.
Rev. W. E. Parsons, chairman of the Board of Visitors to the penal and reformatory institutions of Washington, D. C., according to the Washington Post, has expressed himself thus:—
This Congress ought to appoint a commission to oversee all of our correctional and penal institutions. Reforms are badly needed in our police court. Men taken into custody Saturday are confined nearly forty-eight hours with little or nothing to eat, sweltering in the close stench of the police court cells, before they have a hearing. A brief session of court Sunday morning to dispose of unquestioned cases would be in the interests of humanity.
While one set of clergymen and supposed philanthropists are striving to the utmost of their capacity to have all secular occupations, on Sunday done away with by legal enactment, here is another which proposes that the courts shall sit and try cases on Sunday. At first this seems a serious contradiction; but things are not always what they seem, for when this is a Christian Nation, on the lines laid out by the National Reformers, the courts will all be ecclesiastical courts, and then why may they not, according to the tenets of a legal religion, sit for the trial of cases on Sunday at their discretion?
THE authorities of Plainfield, New Jersey, are giving strict attention to the enforcement of laws against the Sunday selling of liquor. Hotel proprietors have been fined one hundred dollars each, for permitting the Sunday sale of liquor on their premises, and the regular saloons and barrooms have been required to remove their screens and window shades, on Sunday, that they may be open to public inspection. As a temperance movement the closing of the saloons one day in seven is inexpressibly futile. But that is not the intent of Sunday closing, it is not an effort for the civil suppression of the liquor traffic, but is an attempt to enforce a moral reform and compel the liquor sellers to respect Sunday; and the general effort is begun with them because of the opportunity against them which their questionable occupation gives.
The city of Toronto has had a rigid Sunday law, so that not even the street cars are allowed to run on that day; but of late a discussion has arisen as to the propriety of permitting street-car service on Sunday as in other cities.
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UNDER the title “Congress and the World’s Fair” the Mail and Express says:—
One of the most notable features of the Congressional Record of this session, up to the present time, is the very large number of petitions presented in the Senate—the House has done no business as yet—asking that an appropriation of $5,000,000 be made for the World’s Columbian Exposition, on condition that the gates be closed on Sunday. These petitions come from all parts of the Union, from religious bodies, from Societies, from private individuals. There are scores of them, and they represent tens of thousands of citizens. They represent, too, the religious feeling of the whole country, which would be outraged if the managers of the World’s Fair should abandon the recognized American policy and keep open the exhibition on Sunday.
This matter it is within the power of the Congress to control. At present the final decision rests with the Commissioners; but if an appropriation of $5,000,000 should be made, coupled with the condition that the Exposition shall be entirely closed on Sundays, that would settle it.
The different methods which have been devised in the past few years, by which to commit Congress to legislation upon re ligious matters, have all been examples of a certain political subtlety; but this last is a peculiar specimen of indirection, by which Congress is asked to interfere with the municipal regulations of the city of Chicago, and stamp upon a religious tenet the governmental sanction of the United States.
A LATE number of the Occident says:—
It will be an everlasting reproach to this Nation if the Columbian Exposition be thrown open on Sunday. We beg our Christian readers to reflect in advance on what may be their duty in such a case. The evil is seriously threatened; how may we meet it? . . . Can Christian men consistently attend an exposition that, under the circumstances, is flung open on the Lord’s day, and made an engine of irreligion?
Upon which the Signs of the Times remarks as follows: “On the same principle Christian men ought not to patronize any railway company which runs Sunday trains, There is a wonderful effervescence of religious zeal every time this entirely unscriptural Sunday question bobs up. We should think that our religious contemporaries would at last come to question as to what is the real basis of all their feelings in this direction. Would it make the people any better if the Columbian Exposition were closed? Does the fact that it might be opened compel any one to disregard the Sunday? The truly loyal would be more loyal at such a time. Is the conscience of the Christian to be governed by act of Congress? Who would reproach the Nation?”
REV. DR. SAWIN, an orthodox minister of Troy, New York, says: “A man who is in the right and is sure of his ground can always afford to be tolerant of the opinions of others. It is only the man who has a secret misgiving that his faith can not stand the investigations of reason who is bigoted and narrow, and who demands that other men shall think as he does or stop thinking altogether.”
THE fashion of Sunday funerals, according to the Washington Post, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in Washington, for the reason that, as the undertaker said to the reporter, “The class of persons we serve no longer bury their dead on the Sabbath;” and also because of the fact that “our best cemeteries, the Catholic being excepted, will not permit a burial on Sunday.”
To be born, to be married, to die, to be buried, on Sunday will soon be quite “bad form” among the religious “four hundred”.
SENATOR GALLINGER, of New Hampshire, the successor of Henry W. Blair, has introduced a bill into the Senate, which, it is said, has been commented on with favor quite generally, to the effect that every person in the employ of the Government who is not native-born, or a completely naturalized citizen of this country, shall be immediately dismissed the service. This is class legislation. It is not the first of its kind, neither will it be the last. But it would be well to look long before leaping in each case. An accumulation of class restrictions means, eventually, paternalism and tyranny, civil and religious.
The Syracuse Times has this:—
“The American Sabbath Union (‘Pearl of Days’ Leaflet No. 3) says:—
“The civil power must recognize some day if we are to have any day of rest.
“How many of the following parallel statements will the American Sabbath Union also indorse?
“The civil power must recognize some God if we are to have any God to worship. The civil power must recognize some religion if we are to have any religion. The civil power must recognize some form of baptism if we are to have any baptism. The Union continues:—
“To permit any one to keep any day he may choose, or no day at all, would soon end in no Sabbath.
“By parity of reasoning, then, to permit any one to recognize some God or no God, some religion or no religion, some form of baptism or no baptism, would soon end in atheism, infidelity and heresy. Are the American Sabbath Unionists ready to swallow the pill? If so, let them explain why the belief and practice of baptism has survived so well without the interposition of civil law. Such is the logic of the advocates of Sunday laws.”
SENATOR PEPPER of Kansas, the Farmers' Alliance Senator, has signalized his entrance into congressional life by offering, among others, a bill to increase the number of chaplains in the army. These bills to give more chaplains to the army, under better pay, are almost unnoticed incidents of each congressional session; but they are a part of the great sum total of effort to saddle religious responsibility upon the Government, which, in the aggregate, has become a noticeable factor in political affairs. To such an extent has this become the fact that the phraseology even of the newspaper correspondents bears unconscious testimony to the hold this question of formal religion is taking on public affairs and public thought.
At a mass-meeting recently held in Washington, D. C., to devise means for promoting the moral welfare of the army and navy, one speaker, who was a military man, is reported as saying that he considered “the preponderance of foreigners in the service a drawback to Christian work.” If that be so the Christianity which is preached to the American soldier and sailor by the paid chaplains of the United States can not be the Christianity of the Bible. Can it be that this is a whisper of the development of the watchword “America for Americans” into “The American Sunday and American religion for Americans.”? Is the Russian national intolerance becoming epidemic as well as the Russian influenza?
THOSE who wish bound volumes of THE AMERICAN SENTINEL, for 1891, should send their names at once. Only a limited number will be bound, and orders will be filled as they are received. The prices will be the same as last year, namely, heavy manilla paper, $1.50, half roan, (cloth, with leather back) $2.50.
