AMS BETWEEN Sunday work and Sunday idleness, is there any question as to which will be the more productive of crime?
THE man who cannot get to church because a Sunday newspaper is thrown in his direction, will certainly never get far in the direction of heaven until he becomes better fitted to overcome spiritual obstacles. But a Sunday law will not qualify him in this respect.
WAMSHINGTON warned the nation against foreign entanglements; Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and have the same unalienable rights; Abraham Lincoln said that no man was good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent, and that the doing of such a thing was despotism. It is not strange therefore that the advocates of foreign conquest, in their efforts to justify the same, never quote from these American authorities.
THE command to keep the Sabbath is a command to sanctify one day of the week, and cannot therefore be kept by sanctifying two days of the week. Conscience tells an individual that he should sanctify—or set apart—a certain day of the week, by resting from his work, and the law, perchance, says that he must rest on a different day. Either, then, he must disregard the Sabbath command by sanctifying two days of the week, or he must disregard his conscience by sanctifying a day he believes to be the wrong one, or must disregard the law of the land. Which shall he do?
AMS the SENTINEL has much to say against reform ideas of certain religious or semi-religious societies, large and small, which have now become quite numerous in the land, we wish to say also that its columns are open to representatives of these organizations for the presentation of their side of the questions discuss, and we shall be pleased if any of them will avail themselves of this offer, in the interests of truth, stipulating only that they be able to state their views clearly and concisely, and within the limits of space which the SENTINEL can afford to give. And we will be governed by the same rules in replying. We challenge no one, but we wish to be fair with all whose ideas we condemn, and to show that we are contending now for our own advantage, but for the truth.
WE are told that “a degradation of morals usually follows a profanation of the Sabbath day.” One would get the idea from this that the profanation of the Sabbath is the cause of the degradation of morals, instead of being as it really is, an effect of that degradation. There must first be a degradation of morals before there can be an immoral act; and therefore the profanation of the Sabbath, which is an immoral act, is not the source of the evil; and to reach that source the reformer must go back of Sabbath desecration.
THE effect of religious legislation upon the sinner is to force him either to give up his own religion, or to practice two religions at once.
RELIGIOUS legislation and religious liberty may be likened to a lion and the lamb,—they cannot lie down together.
THE law of God operates upon the heart through love; the law man operates through fear.