Passion, Purpose & Power
44. Newspaper Comments1
It seems absolutely incredible that in this age of enlightenment, in these free United States, men should suffer and families be plunged into sorrow because they have exercised a right of conscience guaranteed to them by the Constitution of their country. The sooner a test case is appealed to the highest tribunal in the land for adjudication, the better for the honor of Tennessee and every State ridden by bad laws, passed in violation of individual liberty.—Chicago Daily Globe PPP 223.1
There was no pretense, except in the indictment, that anybody had been at all disturbed by this secular employment. The peace was in no way threatened. No more was proven than that the Christian neighbors were scandalized that the law should be thus broken. And the great commonwealth of Tennessee has at its mercy some half-dozen patient, industrious, well-meaning citizens, religious beyond the ordinary practice of ordinary Christians, and so holds them because of an intolerance which, whatever may be the technical law, is opposed to the very spirit of our republican institutions. PPP 223.2
There seems to be no remedy for it, and these men must serve out their sentences. But the sooner Tennessee places itself, through its Legislature, upon a par with liberal, right-minded people everywhere in the Republic, the better it will be for both the moral and the material prosperity of that State.—Chicago Times PPP 224.1
Let us be careful how we let in the camel’s nose of religious legislation, lest the brute crowd his bulky form in and occupy the whole shop. If the law by which these men were legally imprisoned be a righteous law, then may any State, nation, or country set up a religious creed and enforce it; then France treated properly the Huguenots; Russia the Jews, and early New England and Virginia the Baptists and Quakers. Protestant America had better be careful how she lays foundations for other men to build upon. Rome has as good a right to build in her way as we have in our way.—Church Bulletin (Baptist), South Chicago PPP 224.2
It seems that Mr. King, who is a farmer, was indicted for quietly working on his own premises, “not in sight of any place of public worship.” He disturbed no one by his work, but it was held that “the moral sense” of the people had sustained a shock by seeing work done on the Sabbath, and this statement was made against him at his trial. PPP 224.3
But this is not all. The man was first carried before a Justice of the Peace; his case was heard, and the Justice imposed a fine of three dollars and costs, amounting in all to about twelve dollars. For the same offense he was afterward indicted by the Grand Jury, and fined the sum of seventy-five dollars. PPP 224.4
The peculiar sect to which Mr. King belongs, observes Saturday as the Sabbath; hence the fact of his working on the first day of the week, and thereby offending the high moral sense of the good people in his neighborhood; and it seems that there is an association in Tennessee which is pledged to the prosecution of all violators of the Sunday laws of the State, and this unfortunate man has fallen under the ban of its displeasure. PPP 224.5
He is evidently traveling in hard lines. . . . Whatever the merits of the case may be, Mr. King can count on public sympathy, for from the statement of it in the Tennessee papers, he appears to be a sadly persecuted man, and the history of the case thus far smacks of injustice and religious intolerance which is novel in its Puritanic severity. The man appears to have been dragged from court to court and jury to jury, subjected to great pecuniary expense, fined twice for the same offense—if an act like his, committed in accordance with the rules of his sect, can indeed be called an offense.—Atlanta Constitution PPP 224.6
The keeper of Saturday has an undoubted moral right to his convictions. More than this, his legal right to observe Saturday as a holy day and Sunday as a secular day ought not to be called in question in free America, by any civil authority. It would not be in doubt for a moment were it not for the existence of legal anachronisms that should have gone out with the witchcraft laws, or at the latest, with George the Third.—Boston Daily Globe PPP 225.1
It is not to be contended that Mr. King disturbed any neighbor in the employment of a quiet Sunday, but merely that this working on Sunday and his observance of Saturday as his Sabbath instead, was an offense to the moral sense of the community, and a violation of the laws of the State. PPP 225.2
If it was so, it is high time for the community in which Mr. King lives, to discipline its moral sense, and for his State to re-arrange its laws in conformity with that principal of individual liberty which lies at the foundation of American institutions. PPP 225.3
The principle involved is simple, and its application plain. The State has nothing to do with religion, except to protect every citizen in his religious liberty. It has no more right to prescribe the religious observance of Sabbaths and holy days, than to order sacraments and to ordain creeds.—New York World PPP 225.4
So long as the labor of Adventists on Sunday does not interfere with the rights of the Mosaic and Puritanic people on the same day, the prosecution of them seems neither more nor less than persecution. —Chicago Tribune PPP 225.5
People are asking if we are returning to the days of Cotton Mather or the Spanish Inquisition, that faithful, law-abiding citizens must be fined or driven from the country when their only offense consists in quietly carrying out the convictions of conscience.—Louisville Courier Journal PPP 226.1
Mr. King is an honest, hard-working farmer. He is charged with no breach of morals, in fact it appears that he is a remarkably upright man; but he is a Seventh-day Adventist; that is, he does not hold the same religious views as the majority of his State. He stands in the same relation to his countrymen as that occupied by the early disciples of Christ to Roman society when Nero undertook to punish Christians by kindling nightly human fires for the delectation of conservative or majority thought. He is in the minority, even as the Huguenots were in the minority when the Church tortured, racked, and burned them for the glory of God and the good of humanity. He is in the minority as was Roger Williams when, in 1635, the popular and conservative thought of Salem banished him. Mr. King is not an infidel or even a doubter. On the contrary he is ardently religious, being a zealous member of a sect of Christians noted for their piety and faith. . . .In vain the long-cherished idea that this country was to pass down the cycle of time, known as the land of freedom; that it was to be forever the asylum of religious liberty and the cradle of progress, unless the sober thought of our people be at once aroused to stem the rising tide of governmentalism and the steady encroachment of religious organizations and despotic foreign thought.—The Arena PPP 226.2
There can be but one opinion upon this decision among all liberal- minded men. It is odious sophistry ! unworthy of the age in which we live, and under it an American citizen has been condemned to spend the rest of his days in a dungeon, unless he shall stoop to deny the dictates of his own conscience, and dishonor his own manhood.—New York Commercial Advertiser PPP 226.3
In all America there is not a class of people more law-abiding or God-fearing than are these Seventh-day Adventists, and it will be passing strange if they are not permitted to trace their religious belief back to the Fountain-head, and exercise the privilege of observing the original Sabbath, so long as they are not interfering with the rights of others.—Spokane Falls Review PPP 227.1
Not being able to leave his crops unworked for two days in the week, Mr. King plowed them on Sunday after having kept the Sabbath the day before. He was arrested under the Sunday law, and in order to make it effective against him, it was alleged that his work on his own farm on Sunday created a public nuisance. On this entirely untenable ground, he has been harassed from court to court. He was a poor man, but has been supported by the friends of religious liberty. Mr. King has been greatly wronged, but his only remedy at law is under the law and constitution of Tennessee. It appears that for the present his remedy is denied him, and this being the case, he has no better course than to submit to the oppression and go to prison—to the convict camp, if it suits the convenience of his persecutors to send him there.—St. Louis Republic PPP 227.2
All these religious laws and prosecutions which have stained the history of the Church in all ages, come not from an earnest, Christian desire to elevate mankind, but from the malicious disposition of the professor of religion to punish the man who dares to question the superior excellence of his professions. The religious Sunday observer of Tennessee could afford to be lenient with the squirrel hunters whose rifles could be heard popping in the timber on all hours of that holy day. He could easily ignore their violations of his Sunday law because the transgressors were low white trash whose influence cut no figure. But when a man making equally high religious professions with himself, whose life was just as pure and exemplary, who derived the authority for his position from the same sacred volume from which he derived his, and could defend his position with arguments and citations which could not be refuted,—when such a man disputed the sanctity of his Sunday observance, a challenge was thrown out which he could not afford to ignore without serious sacrifice of his professed sanctity. It was not Mr. King’s immortal soul he cared to save from the consequences of his Sunday labor; it was Mr. King’s influence that challenged the soundness of his theology, and set at naught his assumed religious superiority and authority, and aroused a combative malice that would have lighted the fagots around the seventh-day observer, had the law of the State permitted it.—Sigourney (Iowa) Review PPP 227.3
The law which does not allow a man who rests on Saturday to work on Sunday, in such a way as not to interfere with the rest of others, is bad law and bad morals and bad religion.—New York Independent PPP 228.1
If in any State the Adventist, the Hebrews, or any other people who believe in observing Saturday instead of Sunday, should happen to predominate, and they undertook to throw Christians into dungeons, and after branding them criminals, should send them to the penitentiary for working on Saturday, indignation would blaze forth throughout Christendom against the great injustice,the wrong against the liberty of the rights of the citizen. The only difference is that poor Mr. King is in the minority; he is the type of those who always have been, and always will be, made to suffer when the government is strong enough to persecute all who do not accept when is considered truth and right by the majority.—The Arena—In the Chain-Gang for Conscience’ Sake, National Religious Liberty Association [1892], pp. 1-11. PPP 228.2