The leading article in Our Day for April is an address by Rev. W. F. Crafts, at Mr. Cook’s Monday lecture, March 25, and is entitled, “A Strategic Year in Sabbath Reform.” This is a most appropriate heading for a summary of the work of the American Sabbath Union during the year 1888. It shows that Mr. Crafts appreciates the situation. A strategem is defined by Webster as “a trick by which some advantage is to be obtained. An artifice.” Strategic means, “pertaining to strategy, effected by artifice. Therefore, since, according to Mr. Crafts, the year 1888 has been a strategic year in the Sunday work, it has been a year of trickery and fraud.AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.1

That this is indeed so must be evident to anyone who has read the SENTINEL’S exposure of the methods of Mr. Crafts and his associate Sunday reformers. They started out with deceit, and with exhortation to deceive, when they requested all public conventions to indorse the Sunday petition by vote, and then to duplicate the strength of the petition as far as possible by securing the individual signatures of the assembly. Then, by securing a few representative indorsements, they counted in whole denominations, thousands of members of which had never heard of the petition. A letter from Cardinal Gibbons stating simply that he personally favored the movement, was forthwith counted as the signatures of 7,200,000 Catholics. Not content with counting in the entire membership of the various religious organizations as well being twenty-one years of age or more, they went to Sunday-schools, and secured the names of the children to their petition, which stated that each signer is twenty-one years of age or more. Then, in order to swell their list of petitioners, they counted some of the religious denominations twice, then counted the Woman’s Christian Temmperance Unions as local organizations as State organizations, and again twice as a national organization, besides already having counted them in with the religious bodies. The same way with the Knights of Labor. They secured the votes of local assemblies, then by a vote of the general assembly they counted in the entire organization, and then securing a favorable vote from the Counsel of Federated Trades they succeeded in counting the workingmen in again, although thousands of them are opposed to the Blair bills.AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.2

Mr. Crafts went in person to the Assemblies of the Knights of Labor and pleaded with them to indorse his petition. Yet he claims that the petition was started to satisfy the clamor of the workingmen! Not content with these methods of making it appear that the great majority of the people of the country are calling for Sunday laws, they now garble the statements of those who are opposing the movement with all their might, and give it out that their opposition is really not opposition, but a plea for the law.AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.3

Then again the Rev. Herrick Johnson, in his address on Sunday newspapers at the Washington Conference, in December, said, as quoted in the February number of Our Day:—AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.4

“If we base the Sabbath on mere human expediency, we base it on sand, just as we would found honesty, if we adopted it simply as a policy. This is no basis for the Sabbath, to put it on the ground of mere expediency. I do not question the propriety of using this argument as a means of influencing a certain class of men. Many will join in this Sunday movement and work heartily in the defense of Sunday as a rest-day, in the interests of health and morals, and good citizenship, who will not come to the higher ground. But we can never permanently keep our Sabbath on the basis of expediency.”AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.5

Here we find this man, a zealous advocate of Sunday laws, deliberately counseling the use of argument in which he does not believe, in order to catch some who will not accept the argument in which he does believe. Much more to the same intent might be quoted, but this is sufficient to show the aptness of the title which Mr. Crafts gives to his summary of Sunday work,—a year of artifice and fraud. The same course was pursued in the history of the early church, as is shown by the following quotation from Mosheim:—AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.6

“By some of the weaker brethren, in their anxiety to assist God with all their might (in the propagation of the Christian faith), such dishonest artifices were occasionally resorted to as could not, under any circumstances, admit of excuse, and were utterly unworthy of that sacred cause which they were unquestionably intended to support.”—Commentaries, cent. 2, sec. 7.AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.7

It was just such work as that which resulted in the establishment of the man of sin-the Papacy. It is just such work in these days that will result in the formation of a living image to that man of sin-an American Papacy.AMS May 15, 1889, page 123.8

E. J. W.

May 1, 1889

May 22, 1889