August 17, 1899
A SUNDAY law would have stopped creation itself on the very first day.
THE Christian faith needs no defense from the power of human law. The best possible way to defend the faith is to let the faith defend itself.
A LAMB and wolf—religious liberty and religious legislation—cannot be kept alive in the same enclosure.
THE public … in a community can be … disturbed by the enforcement of Sunday statutes in a single day, but it is by the quiet pursuit of business callings on Sunday in a whole generation.
IT is the wolf that accuses the lamb of soiling the stream at which they drink; it is the outlaw that most loudly cries, “stop, thief!” It is the unjust statute that poses most conspicuously as the bulwark of right and liberty.
THE State cannot safeguard religious freedom and uphold a religious dogma at the same time. For a religious dogma that desires the support of the State, is always the implacable enemy of any opposing religious doctrine, and will attack it under the State’s authority at every opportunity.
ANTIQUITY is not always a point in favor of the thing which it invests. A thing subject to decay, becomes altogether unfit for human use by the lapse of time. And as every human institution is subject to a more or less speedy dissolution, it must needs be a mistake to attempt to perpetuate such an institution because it has grown hoary with age. An old error has accumulated evil about itself until it has become must worse than when it was new.
“AMS the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” So says the Lord in Isaiah 55:9. The law of the Lord reaches and covers the secret thoughts and motives of the heart; it is infinitely broader and higher than the law of man. It is plain, therefore, that a human law upholding the law of God represents an inverted pyramid, and therefore that the idea which it embodies is altogether wrong.