June 15, 1899
THE realm of conscience is sacred to the individual and his God.
A MAN has the same right to enjoy himself on Sunday that he has to enjoy himself on any other day, goer or not.
IRRELIGION is a sin, but it is not properly a crime.
THE more aid the church receives from the state, the weaker she becomes as a spiritual power.
SO LONG as the church upholds Sunday laws, she denies the Scriptural doctrine that an individual can do right only through the exercise of faith.
IF a person does not want spiritual recreation on the Sabbath, he ought not therefore to be prohibited from taking what recreation he can get in a physical way.
NO person has a right to prohibit other people from holding and teaching opinions contrary to his own, or to have his feelings guarded by law against a possible shock. No progress in the knowledge of religious truth was ever made without a shock to somebody’s feelings.
A SUNDAY law invades one individual’s rights for the sake of saving another person’s feelings.
THE church can impress the world only by manifesting to the world the power of godliness. When she invokes the civil power in the aid of religion she only impresses the world with a sense of the hypocrisy of her profession.
NO HUMAN law can offset the power of the “law of sin and death” that, as the Scripture declares, is at work in every unconverted heart. Until that is overcome by the “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” the individual will be bound by it in spite of all the Sunday laws or other religious laws that can be enacted. And when he has been freed from the power of sin by the “law of the Spirit of life,” he will need no man-made religious laws to enable him to do right.