WE have mentioned the political campaign which the Sunday-law advocates are carrying on to secure representatives pledged to enact Sunday laws. It is the same old trickery put in new dress. The following statement of The Dial gives a good view of the way they are doing it:—
The very beneficent Sunday-law devotees have mapped out an importunate campaign for the present season in California. Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts and Mrs. Bateham, both of national reputation in the line of Sunday fanaticism, have come from the East to assist poor California in the herculean task of extricating herself from Sunday desecration. In addition to this, the local co-adjutors, male and female, are training for a fight to the finish.
Dr. Thompson, the State satellite of the American Sabbath Union, a few weeks ago laid out the plan of operations before the pastors of San Diego, which, in brief, comprised the following programme: First, to labor to secure recognition by one or both of the great political parties by Sunday-law planks in their State platforms; second, failing to effect the point in this way, the next step will be to work upon individual candidates for the Legislature. Faithful friends of the measure in each district will interview the candidate of one party and if possible procure his private pledge to support a Sunday law. They can say to him, “Your party is not committed either way, you are at perfect liberty to do as you please; your position need not be known during the campaign;182just privately pledge yourself to us and we will throw our weight in the balance in your favor.”
The point will be to assure the candidate that all the church people are united on this question, and will all vote for any one who is pledged to support a Sunday law. If he fail to see it in that light, he is to understand that he will be tabooed by the good people, and their support will be given to the other man. In this campaign everything political in the power of the sacred circle is to be bartered for a Sunday law.
There are in the plans for this campaign, although in the name of religion, the elements of the most deceptive political schemes ever brought to light in the State. This State movement is part and parcel of the game for a national Sunday law, which in turn is a link in the National Reform Constitutional Amendment plot; and their principal hope, all the way through, is based on the verdancy or the cupidity of politicians. They would loudly denounce the same principle of operations if brought to bear against their pet project. The line upon which the Sunday-law politicians are working, was laid out at a National Reform Convention, held in Pittsburg, in 1874, when Dr. Robert Audley Browne gave vent to the following sentiment:—
There is no more persistent man alive than the typical representative American office-seeker. Of that class, the most of those who have not yet found whether they are for Christ or not, or who are openly decrying this movement, are ready to be its firm friends as soon as they acquire wisdom to discern the signs of the times, and are assured of its speedy success. They may pull back now at the hind axle, or scotch the wheels of the car of progress; but when they see it move, they will quickly jump in to get front seats, and avow “they always thought it was a good thing.” When our Master comes into his kingdom in our beloved land, they will be candidates for the foremost positions, and scramble with the mother of Zebedee’s children for the right or left hand places in the kingdom.
This shows the character of the weapons they propose to use, and the programme proposed for the California campaign shows the deceptive manner in which the weapons are to be secured. Verily “the end justifies the means” from a Sunday-law standpoint. When a professedly Christian people begin to work in a secret manner with such candidates as can be secretly induced to barter principle for votes, it is time for honest people to look with suspicion upon the object sought by such means.
Not only is there deception proposed in regard to the manipulation of candidates, but there is equally as rank deception in regard to the character of the “Sabbath” which it is designed to bind upon the people of the State. The leaders of this movement have two propositions before the people: To the church people the very solemn plea is made that the sacred Sabbath is being desecrated by the ungodly use of the day; while to the general public the call is for a merely “civil Sabbath,” in order that the poor workingman may have a day of rest and recreation. The Oakland apostle of this religio-political movement, Rev. N. R. Johnston, even goes so far as to blandly plead for the saloon-keepers’ opportunity to go to the picnic on Sunday: while on the other hand the wickedness of the Sunday picnic has been held up as the grand reason why we should have a Sunday law. In his call for a convention at San Jose on the twentieth and twenty-first of this month, he shows the religious character of the civil Sabbath that his party is working for in the following language:—
The great importance of the divine institution, the steady growth of opposition to it as a sacred day of rest, the alarming prevalence of Sabbath desecration, and the danger that a Continental Sunday may displace our true American Sabbath, all call for combined wisdom and united efforts to promote Sabbath sanctification, and to secure a righteous civil law in our State that will tend to prevent the contemptuous disregard of our sacred day of rest.
And all this in the face of the public representations, not only of Mr. Johnston himself, but of Mr. Crafts, Mr. Thompson, and the whole flock of prominent leaders, that all that is wanted is a civil day of rest, a legal holiday in the interests of overworked humanity. Let the people beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
THE American Sabbath Union Convention held a meeting in San Bernardino last week. The stock resolutions against Sunday newspapers were adopted. Sunday trains and Sunday mails were condemned of course. Those present were in earnest and meant what they said, but that doesn't help the matter any.—The Citrograph.
The Sphere of Legislation.
LEGISLATION can deal only with the natural affairs of man. The laws of a land are restraining and compulsory, and can therefore not touch the free will of a man, to which true religion only, can come. No legal enactment can make a man honest; but if he is found guilty of stealing, it can punish him as a warning, and for a season remove him from all opportunities to steal. All legislation is for the protection of the people, to prevent the evil and unjust from molesting others in their just rights. Beyond this it has no power. All it can therefore do for religion, which is of every man's own free choice, is to prevent others from interfering with him in his worship and practices according to his own conscience; and to prevent zealots, who have not the Christian love of the neighbor, from molesting others.
THE AMERICAN SENTINEL seems therefore to be right in opposing religious legislation. . . . All just laws are made for the protection of the people in all their just rights; of which religious liberty is the first; but no law can enforce, or even defend, any form of religion.—Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, Herald.
A Political Revolution in Wisconsin.
THE last Wisconsin Legislature, passed at its last session what is known as the BENNETT law, making education in Wisconsin compulsory, and enacting this provision beside:—
No school shall be regarded as a school under this act, unless there shall be taught therein as part of the elementary education of children, reading, writing, arithmetic, and United States history in the English language.
Upon its face this provision might seem to be fair enough, but, closely considered, it is found to embody features replete with mischief. The State of Wisconsin contains a very large foreign-born population, chiefly German, Scandinavian, and Belgian. In many of its towns German is extensively spoken; in most of the private and parochial schools German is taught.
To make education compulsory, while denying to the schools where children of German parents are instructed a legal existence as schools, means substantially, their abolition; and if the State has the right to prescribe what language shall be taught in schools that are not maintained by the State, but supported and managed by private individuals, it must also have the right to prescribe and supervise all their other studies. Against such an invasion of private rights the citizens of Milwaukee have now protested with such vigor and effectiveness that the only thing to be done with the Bennett law is to repeal it.
If the local authorities of New York were to direct that Latin or Greek should no longer be taught in any of our colleges; if they undertook to furnish the text books of history to be used in private schools and to interdict all others; if they assumed to interfere with the religious training of the young, either in parochial or Sunday schools, a strong expression of dissent would promptly follow. The State maintains its own schools, and there is no interference of any sort, sectarian or political, with their management; but the dictation of the State cannot be permitted any further than in the schools which it supports by taxation.
Penal laws for the obliteration of a language have been passed and cruelly enforced in Ireland and Poland, but they can have no place upon the statute books in this country. The people of Milwaukee gave their views upon the subject very decisively; and similar views, it is quite safe to say, are entertained by a majority of the voters of every populous community in the United States, where English is not exclusively spoken.—The Sun.
Remarkable Language.
By The Sun
THE Rev. Dr. Parkhurst used this very remarkable language in the course of a sermon last Sunday at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church:—
It is as much a Christian's duty to love his country as his God. To an American the Stars and Stripes ought to be as much of his actual religion as the Sermon on the Mount. It is as much the duty of a New York Christian to go to the polls on election day as for him to go to the Lord's table on communion day.
The command of Jesus is to love God with the whole heart, and your neighbor as yourself. Therefore, love for mankind as brethren is a Christian sentiment. But patriotism is a restriction of that sentiment to a man's own country.
Great as are the “Stars and Stripes,” and glorious beyond measure, is a Christian preacher justified in calling them as much a part of religion as the Sermon on the Mount, in which is contained the very kernel and epitome of Christianity? They are for time; but does not Dr. Parkhurst believe that the words of Jesus are for eternity, for the endless ages, when the symbols of earthly power shall have passed into nothingness?
The duty of a Christian to go to the polls is a great and a high duty. He shares it with the Jew and the pagan; but were not the Madison Square Presbyterians a little startled to hear Dr. Parkhurst putting it on the same religious plane with the duty of partaking of the sacrament as distinctive of Christianity?
Such language is very extraordinary. But Dr. Parkhurst, it must be remembered, is a Presbyterian of the agnostic variety.—The Sun.
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THE NATIONAL SUNDAY LAW
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ARGUMENTS ON THE Breckinridge Sunday Bill.
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In defense of the Bennett law, Governor Hoard cites the fact that some persons who could not understand English had been seduced into signing what they supposed were contracts to sell patent rights or something of that sort, while in fact they had signed promissory notes for large amounts of money, or perhaps mortgages on their farms. Well, we have known that to be done all over the land, to people who could not understand any language but English. If the Governor’s argument means anything, it means that people who can speak, read, and write English are thereby made safe from being deceived or swindled. That is giving rather more virtue to the English language than it had ever yet been known to display. But perhaps the idea is intended to be conveyed that the Bennett law gives to the English language this virtue. If so, then the argument has at least one merit, it is the only real point that has yet been made in favor of that law.
The Canadian Supreme Court has just decided that in the works of Victor Hugo there is nothing immoral, even though they may be condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. The case grew out of the refusal of certain Catholic booksellers of Montreal to fulfill a contract which they had made to supply a customer with Hugo’s works, on the ground that as Catholics they could not sell works condemned by the church. The court very properly held that the Congregation of the Index, or any other congregation, could not make laws annulling the legal contracts between its own members and outside parties. The Catholic Review of this city complains that this is simply a Protestant decision, and that it places the booksellers in a dilemma: they must “commit a grievous sin by dealing in prohibited books, or they lose heavily by breaking their contract.” This, the Review thinks, “only illustrates a plain but much-obscured fact, that Church and State cannot ignore each other, even if they would.” It is evident that the editor of the Catholic Review would like to see “the Church” clothed with power to revoke civil contracts just as she used to do in the palmy days of the Inquisition. The bookseller was not obliged to make that contract; but having voluntarily entered into such a contract it was only justice that he should fulfill it. Let Roman Catholics make no such contracts, and they will have no such difficulties. No decree of any church can impair the obligation of contracts.
THE German Emperor makes “Sunday rest” the phase of the industrial question, which claims “the foremost attention.” It will not be long before the Sunday-law question becomes not only a national but an international one.
THE Woman’s Christian Temperance Union takes to itself much credit for securing the Illinois Compulsory Education law. They are entitled to all the credit that attaches to such a statute. The law is entirely worthy of its source
THE Christian Union says that “Few intelligent Christians believe that the earthly body has any resurrection.” Such “intelligence” as that is the most serious kind of ignorance. Such wisdom as that is of that kind which by wisdom knows not God, at the last. The earthly body of Jesus Christ had a resurrection, and so must every one have who will ever be where he is.
A CONTRIBUTOR to the Western Wave, of South Dakota, states that in some of the public schools in Grant County in that State “the Roman Catholic catechism is being taught.” Those who know of it ought to have it stopped. The Roman Catholics of South Dakota have no more right to use their catechism in the public school, than the Protestants of Wisconsin have to use the King James version of the Bible in the public school.
THE Hon. J. M. Palmer, late United States minister to Spain, adopted in Spain, and brought home with him, a Spanish boy. As the Spanish nurse who had engaged to come was hindered at the last moment, Mr. Palmer waited in this city until another could come from Spain; because, he says, he desires that conversation with the child shall be wholly in Spanish, and that his instruction shall be in that language also. It is a good thing that Mr. Palmer lives in Michigan, instead of Wisconsin or Illinois. Otherwise, he might soon find himself undergoing prosecution for not giving the child instruction in English, and for not causing the child to forget the Spanish language as soon as possible.
SUNDAY evening, May 11, Rev. Theo. Clifton, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, delivered a lecture on “What Protestants May Learn from Catholics,” in which he said:—
They [the Catholics] must give to support their work. They dare not do otherwise for fear the priest will send them to hell. When I have gone to a millionaire to get a few hundred dollars for the support of our cause, and have been refused, I have sometimes wished for the power of the priest to say to him, “Give me a hundred thousand dollars or here you go.”
That is just about the size of it. That is a very fair illustration of what Protestant preachers learn from Roman Catholic priests, and of how they learn it. The trouble is, they are learning too much from this source. Woe to the people when these men get the power to practice what they are learning. Mr. Clifton is a Congregationalist.
MANITOBA has adopted a law by which it is proposed that from the first day of May and forward, the schools shall be public schools, and so conducted as to be without offense to Catholic or Protestant; in short, unsectarian. Accordingly instructions were given as follows:—
On the first of May the Catholic school board will cease to exist and the Protestant school board will become the public school board of the city. The members of the Protestant school board will continue in the office of public school trustees for the remainder of their respective terms. After the first of May all moneys due to the Catholic school board on the levy of 1890 will belong and be payable to the public school board.
This is to say, that the public schools of Manitoba shall henceforth be Protestant public schools, and that they shall be unsectarian Protestant schools. This is the same kind of public schools that those people in this country want, who are clamoring for the teaching of religion in the public schools.
SOME time ago we mentioned the pamphlet “Bible Principles and the Union of Church and State,” issued by the London branch of the Pacific Press. We had then received only a sample copy. We are glad to announce that we have the pamphlet now in stock and can fill orders promptly. Aside from the Bible principles, which are universal, there is much in this pamphlet that is of interest to the people of the United States in its excellent showing of some of the workings of Church and State when legally, or rather illegally, joined. In the presence of the workings of the National Reform Association and its allies this book makes good reading for Americans. We shall present extracts from time to time in THE SENTINEL; but everybody should have the pamphlet. Send in your orders. Price, forty cents.