IN the Christian Statesman of August 1, Rev. M. A. Gault, district secretary of the National Reform Association and of the American Sabbath Union, gave a report of work in Kansas in behalf of a National Sunday law. He said he “presented the Sabbath movement at a union service of all the Nortonville churches” June 16, then said:—
“There is a Seventh-day Baptist congregation here which exerts an unfavorable influence upon Sabbath observance.”
Now the petition in which Mr. Gault and the Sunday-law workers ask for a National Sunday law, proposes to exempt from its provisions those who religiously and regularly observe another day. But Seventh-day Baptists do religiously and regularly observe another day. They observe it much more religiously than nine-tenths of those who keep Sunday, and yet Mr. Gault complains that they exert an unfavorable influence upon Sabbath observance.
This shows at a glance all the virtue there is in that proposed exception in the petition. It is only a ruse which is employed to attract the attention and allay the opposition of the seventh day people until the law is secured. Then it will be found at once that all observance of another day exerts an unfavorable influence upon Sabbath observance; and all such unfavorable influences will be speedily checked. For the seventh-day people to consent to any such proposed exceptions as the Sunday-law petition proposes to offer, is to put themselves into the power of the Sunday-law workers and managers. It is to surrender themselves and all their rights, civil and religious, bodily into the hands of these men. The very kind favors which these men pretend so generously to hold forth in order the more easily to obtain the power which they seek, will be considered in a far different light when they once secure the power. In the effort to secure their coveted power it is to their interest to allay as far as possible every element of opposition. There is nothing that they hate more than an open free discussion of the principles which they advocate, but when they shall have secured the power and such opposition is no longer to be feared, then any such compromise will be counted by them as only treason to their cause. We think that the seventh-day people are wide enough awake to see this, and if it should be so that any of them are not, then we pity them and confess ourselves disappointed.
The truth is that the proposed exception in the National Sunday-law petition is one of its very wickedest features, and those to whom it is offered can never afford to accept it.
A. T. J.