Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/28

16 enforcement of the law, be urged upon grounds of policy and expediency, each man instantly claims the right to judge for himself as to what is expedient or necessary. Divine authority alone can give a Sabbath. Human authority can give no more than a holiday.

The results which confront us indicate an underlying philosophy against which it is useless to fight. They show that the pagan conception, which makes the state the source of authority in religious matters, the arbiter of disputes, or the regulator of acts, is not only foreign to the true Christian conception, but is destructive of it. The Christianity of the fourth century was widely removed from the Christianity of the apostles. No one element did more to create this degeneracy than the interference by the state in matters of religion. No form of interference affected the life of the people more than legislation concerning holy-days and religious festivals. The effort which Puritanism made to lift the whole question to a higher level has failed because it persisted in the fundamental error that the state may justly legislate concerning religious duties. Religious sabbatizing is a duty which men owe to God alone. Civil law can make a holiday, can institute a day on which business and labor will cease; it can never make a Sabbath any more than it can make an honest man. All appeal to civil law concerning Sabbath-keeping is necessarily degrading, and opposed to the genius of Christianity. The Sunday laws have not become obsolete because men are comparatively more wicked than before, but because men have steadily risen above the pagan conception which permits the state thus to interfere. He who complains of the decline in regard for Sunday laws complains of an unavoidable fruitage which has always appeared and always will appear when the state interferes with religious matters.

Another result has developed in connection with our Sunday laws whereby the vilest and most nefarious business known to our civilization has intrenched itself behind them, and at the same time defies them. The enforced leisure which the Sunday laws and the customs concerning Sunday have brought about make Sunday the great harvest-day for the saloons and their associate evils. The Sunday laws prohibit many forms of legitimate business which our Christian civilization has come to allow, and any persistent effort to enforce the Sunday laws against the saloon is met by the saloonist with the counter-effort to enforce the laws against legitimate business. In the absence of any struggle with the saloon, nobody thinks of enforcing the laws against legitimate business, or against popular amusements. Meanwhile the rum-traffic, content to close the front door, if that be really insisted upon, goes forward, and will continue to go forward, unchecked. Legitimate business can not afford to be interfered with, and the liquor power, holding the club in its own hand, says, "Permit me to go forward, through the side-door at least, or I will give you endless trouble through the same law whereby you seek to interfere