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HE espousal of Sunday laws by ministers of the gospel is repudiation of the teachings of the Son of God, who, when among men, defined the limits of civil government and the legitimate operation of law in earthly governments as pertaining only to things purely civil. He thus placed all religious obligation on the basis of individual responsibility to God. The Great Teacher said: "Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's." Matt. 22:21.

Sabbath keeping rests, not on the ground of civil obligation, but upon religious convictions and conscience. "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God," says the divine commandment. The sabbatic institution, whether it is held to be Saturday or Sunday, involves worship. Its violation is not a crime per se, but a sin. And civil government is not equipped with machinery delicate enough to deal with sin. God will attend to that in the last great judgment.

Citizens of all governments, in virtue of being human beings, are bound by the sabbatic command to render the Sabbath, not to Cæsar, but to God. The breaking of the Sabbath law is not a crime per se. It does not rest upon the same basis as robbery, murder, bigamy, slander, or tax dodging. When Christ was asked to classify the commandments, He defined them in such a way as to make it clear that the first four grow out of the spiritual relationship and obligation of man to God; while the last six clearly proceed from the natural relationship of man to man, all children of the same Father. With the latter requirements the state can deal on the ground of conserving civil rights, but it is limited even then to dealing with criminal acts and not with sinful thoughts. But with the first four of God's precepts, including

the fourth or Sabbath commandment, the state must not interfere. This is what man owes to God. And here is where the sabbatic institution rests till God is through with civil governments and sets up a government of His own. Any manmade government, therefore, which makes and enforces a Sabbath law overreaches its divinely appointed limits, and sooner or later will persecute. All history teaches this.

It is the sacred duty of both churchman and statesman to learn from God and history the limitations placed on church and state and then to see that each operates within its own sphere.

Because an idea is enacted into law, it does not follow that the law is right and the dissenter wrong. It is well said by some one that laws do not create principles, but principles laws. The law itself may be wrong and the dissenter right. Perhaps the law ought to be repealed instead of enforced. stead of enforced. It all depends on the principles involved. Concerning the death of Christ the multitude cried, "We have a law, and by our law He ought to die." John 19:7. And because of their malice He did die. Were the Jews and the Romans right and Christ wrong! Let Christendom answer. A law enacted by the Chaldean government infringing on the rights of conscience, was enforced and three of the Hebrew nobility were cast into the "burning fiery furnace." Was the law right and were these young men wrong in their disregard of its claims? Let the Son of God, who rescued them (Dan. 3:25, 26), and Nebuchadnezzar, who bore witness, answer. The answer has been given. The young men were right, and the law was wrong.

Again, a small group of bigoted religionists, devoid of a knowledge of the sacred principles of the rights of con science, succeeded by questionable methods in getting a religious idea, or more

can, to the wilderness in the midst of an inhospitable winter, at the mercy of savages, and that perpetrated numerous other outrages on civilization? Americans, Christians, and all well-balanced, clear-thinking men unite in deprecating Sunday laws because of their history written in characters of blood. They have been tried and found wanting. When states and nations commit themselves to such laws and their enforcement, only to find them largely inoperative, it is not the people who disregard such laws who are to blame, but the vicious laws themselves.

quently in the presence of innocence and intelligence. Truly it was the law and not Daniel that was wrong.

Where is the Christian who will not admit that the law of Rome which beheaded Paul and crucified Peter and attempted to boil John and made torches of scores of Christians and banished the teachers of truth, was emphatically wrong from the standpoint of Christ's teaching and from the modern American conception of human rights?

What fair-minded person, preacher or layman, will not protest against the ungodly laws that created the Spanish Inquisition, burned Reformers, tortured so-called witches, burned holes in the tongues of Quakers, whipped Puritan Sabbath breakers, banished honest Roger Williams, the first truly great Ameri

The Sunday law reformers say, "Give us good Sunday laws, well enforced by men in local authority, and our churches will be full of worshipers, and our young men and women will be attracted to the divine service." What an admission it is on the part of the Christian ministry to say that the only way in which young men and women can be "attracted" to the church on Sunday is by means of sheriffs, policemen, constables, etc. Has the gospel minister lost his hold on that "all power . . . in heaven and in earth," which the Saviour promised to give to His ministers as a means of "attracting" men and women to the gospel! Must he now turn to the power of civil law to get people to the place of worship? If so, no wonder that the masses choose the theater and ball park and Sunday concert in preference to going to church.

An eminent jurist some years ago expressed the right idea in these words:

"When Christianity asks the aid of government beyond mere impartial protection, it denies itself. Its laws are divine, and not human. Its essential interests lie beyond the reach and range of human governments. United with government, religion never rises above the merest superstition; united with religion, government never rises above the merest despotism; and all history shows us that the more widely and completely they are separated, the better it is for both." - Judge Welch, Ohio Supreme Court, December term, 1872.

Christian preachers who are urging the enactment and rigid enforcement of Sunday laws ought to take a page out of the book of one of the greatest of modern successful evangelists and adopt his policy. Truly it will operate to better advantage. We refer to the late C. H. Spurgeon, the eminent English Baptist clergyman. He said:

"I am ashamed of some Christians because they have so much dependence on Parliament and the law of the land. Much good may Parliament do to true religion, except by mistake. As to getting the law of the land to touch our religion, we earnestly cry, Hands off! leave us alone! Your Sunday bills and all other forms of act-of-Parliament religion seem to me to be all wrong. Give us a fair field and no favor, and our faith has no cause to fear. Christ wants no help from Cæsar. I should be afraid to borrow help from government; it would look to me as if I rested on an arm of flesh, instead of depending on the living God. Let the Lord's day be respected by all means, and may the day soon come when every shop will be closed on the Sabbath, but let it be by the force of conviction and not by the force of the policeman; let true religion triumph by the power of God in men's hearts, and not by the power of fines and imprisonments."

And let all Christians say, Amen!

慌慌济

"THE preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God."

F

President Harding Speaking to a Cro Pilgrim Terce

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30,000 People on the Occasion of the mouth, Mass.

insisting on a wider measure of reiigious tolerance in these colonies. Ultimately, under the Crown's insistence, the franchise was widened by placing it on a property-holding basis rather than on that of church communion. It was a distinct liberalization, a significant broadening of the civic foundation. If a Stuart king took from these colonies the right to choose their own governors, he also undertook to forbid those excesses of religious zeal which led to persecutions for conscience' sake.

"In short, there is some justification

for the generalization that the political tyrants of the Restoration forced a religious freedom on a colonial community whose dominating minority did not want it, while the colonies wrested political freedom from the Crown. The clash between a theocratic tyranny on this side and a political tyranny on the other resulted in the destruction of both, to the vast betterment of every human interest involved.

It was a long, stubborn, determined struggle between forces, neither of which had much capacity for yielding or compromise. In one way or another, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, it was going on practically throughout the entire period from the beginning of the colony at Plymouth to the end of the Revolutionary War and the recognition of independence. Looking back upon it we may say that it was inevitable, and that the end which came to it was an inevitable conclusion. But things which look inevitable in the retrospect, conclusions which seem inescapable when the long scroll of developing events can be unrolled before the mind's eye, are never so apparent during the process of their evolution.

That manifest destiny whose directing hand we descry when we survey the long processes of history, would doubtless have brought at last the happy state of both political and religious freedom. But without that co-operation of forces, that reaction of influence between the old England and the new, we may well doubt whether the light of the new day would have broken through to shine upon the better fortunes of an emancipated race without a struggle longer, by generations,