The Rights of the People
THE COURTS INDORSE THE SUBTERFUGE
From the church organizations the courts have caught up this cry. And, though acknowledging that the Sunday institution is religious; that it is enacted and enforced at the will of the church; and that the logic of it is the union of Church and State; yet they insist that, as it is in the law, and the law is for the public good, no right of dissent can be recognized, but the dissenter “may be made to suffer for his defiance by persecutions, if you call them so, on the part of the great majority.” 49 ROP 249.3
This argument is as old as is the contest for the right of the free exercise of religious belief. It was the very position occupied by Rome when the disciples of Christ were sent into the world to preach religious freedom to all mankind. Religious observances were enforced by the law. The Christians asserted and maintained the right to dissent from all such observances, and, in fact, from every one of the religious observances of Rome, and to believe religiously for themselves, though in so doing they totally disregarded the laws, which, on the part of the Roman State, were held to be beneficial to the population. Then, as now, it was held that, though religious belief was the foundation of the custom, yet this was no objection to it, because it had become a part of the legal system of the government, and was enforced by the State for its own good. 50 But Christianity then refused to recognize any validity in any such argument, and so it does now. ROP 249.4
When Paganism was supplanted by the Papacy in the Roman Empire, the same argument was again brought forth to sustain the papal observances which were enforced by imperial law; and through the whole period of papal supremacy Christianity still refused to recognize any validity whatever in the argument. ROP 250.1
Under the Calvinistic theocracy of Geneva the same argument was again used in behalf of religious oppression. In England the same argument was used against the Puritans and other dissenters in behalf of religious oppression there. In New England, under the Puritan theocracy; the same argument was used in behalf of religious oppression, and to justify the Congregationalists, who had control of legislation, in compelling the Baptists and the Quakers, under penalty of banishment and even of death, to conform to the religious observances of the Congregationalists. ROP 250.2
“The rulers of Massachusetts put the Quakers to death and banished the Antinomians and ‘Anabaptists,’ not because of their religious tenets, but because of their violations of the civil laws. This is the justification which they pleaded, and it was the best they could make. Miserable excuse! But just so it is; wherever there is such a union of church and State, heresy and heretical practices are apt to become violations of the civil code, and are punished no longer as errors in religion, but infractions of the laws of the land. So the defenders of the Inquisition have always spoken and written in justification of that awful and most iniquitous tribunal.”-Baird’s Religion in America, p. 91, note. ROP 251.1
In short, this argument-this “miserable excuse”-whether made by churches or by courts, is the same old serpent (Revelation 12:9, 12, 14) that tortured the Christians to death under Pagan Rome; that burnt. John Huss at Constance, and Michael Servetus at Geneva; that whipped and banished the Baptists, and banished and hanged the Quakers, in New England. Whether used by the Roman State and the Catholic Church, or by other States and other churches, in the early centuries or in these last years of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, that argument is ever the same old serpent, and Christianity has always refused to recognize any validity whatever in it, and it always will. ROP 251.2