Loading...
Larger font
Smaller font
Copy
Print
Contents
  • Results
  • Related
  • Featured
No results found for: "".
  • Weighted Relevancy
  • Content Sequence
  • Relevancy
  • Earliest First
  • Latest First
    Larger font
    Smaller font
    Copy
    Print
    Contents

    November 13, 1889

    “Their Object” American Sentinel 4, 41.

    E. J. Waggoner

    The following paragraph is from a paper on “The American Sabbath,” read at the Ocean Grove Convention, August 9, by Dr. Robert S. Doherty, formerly assistant editor of the New York Christian Advocate. He said:—AMS November 13, 1889, page 330.1

    “The Sunday newspaper, as published in our chief cities, is a peculiarly American institution. It could not be supported by its foreign patronage, nor, for that matter, without Christian patronage. It is directly hostile to the Sabbath. Now the most serious aspect of this Sunday paper business is not so much the fact that a few journeymen printers are engaged after midnight on Saturday, or that the fast train carries the edition with great speed, and with more or less disturbance, out into the remote parts of the country. The chief mischief is done in the reading of the paper. For this there is no excuse. For the harm which comes from it, the reader is himself responsible.”AMS November 13, 1889, page 330.2

    In this short paragraph we have again revealed to us the real object of Sunday laws,—they are not so much for the purpose of prohibiting all labor on the first day of the week, as for the purpose of inducing men to go to church by cutting off all other means of spending the day. From this and similar utterances, we are warranted in the conclusion that if all the people would faithfully attend church every Sunday there would not be so much objection raised to the work which is done outside of church hours.AMS November 13, 1889, page 330.3

    This is not an isolated utterance. Everyone who fights the Sunday newspaper makes the same statement. When told that more work is done on Sunday in preparing the Monday paper than in preparing the Sunday horning edition, they say that the Sunday work that is done by the newspaper employes is not the evil against which they strike; but that what they are concerned about is the fact that the newspapers keep people away from the church and destroy the effect of the sermon on those who do go. Thus they show that they are working not so much in the interest of Sunday rest as in the interest of the pulpit. We wish to emphasize this point until our readers see that this Sunday movement is nothing more nor less than an effort on the part of the churches to have the State legislate in their behalf.AMS November 13, 1889, page 330.4

    But this is not all that is shown; the paragraph just quoted shows the seemingly utter inability of the advocates of Sunday laws to comprehend the fact that the State does not possess the same power that the Spirit of God does. They want the State to pass laws to suppress a thing the evil of which, they themselves confess, rests solely with the individual. It is not a public nuisance-not something which, like the saloon, tends only to destroy the well-being of society; for whatever mischief is done, the individual reader is himself alone responsible. Yet they expect that the State is going to remedy this evil; they expect that the State, by taking away the news-paper, will make the individual who now reads it spiritually-minded. They do not seem to understand that the lack of spirituality is what leads professed Christians to read these papers when they should be engaged in worship; and that if the newspapers were taken away, their carnal minds would find some other worldly means of gratification. If they would think of the matter seriously, they could but confess that the suppression of the Sunday newspaper would not in the slightest degree increase the spirituality of the people; and that admission would at the same time be a confession that they are more interested in having people possess a form of godliness than in laboring through the divinely-appointed agencies to really convert them; in other words, that they have lost sight of the gospel. And so it is no doubt true that while National Reformers have so much to say about atheism on the part of those who oppose Sunday laws, they themselves are most zealously working to undermine true Christianity.AMS November 13, 1889, page 330.5

    E. J. W.

    Larger font
    Smaller font
    Copy
    Print
    Contents