LET no reader of the AMERICAN SENTINEL, while enjoying the comforts of home and the free exercise of religious convictions, forget that a fellow-man is confined in a Tennessee jail for no other offense than following the dictates of his conscience in the matter of Sabbath observance. In this connection it might be well to also remember that in Maryland and Georgia several Sunday cases are now pending. It is almost a foregone conclusion that in at least two or three of these cases imprisonment will follow. Still other States have upon their statute books the necessary laws for inaugurating an era of persecution, and the National Reformers of the various schools and under various names, are fast manufacturing the public sentiment which will erelong set the machinery of the law in motion against those who honor the Bible Sabbath and disregard the papal Sunday.
CATHOLICS are persecuting Methodist missionaries in South America. The Methodists petitioned Archbishop Ireland to petition Satolli to petition the pope to become the champion of religious liberty in South America, where there is a chance to put his beautiful theories set forth in the United States, into actual practice. This was a perplexing matter. These sugar-coated religious liberty pills were for American Protestant palates and not for Spain or South America. Satolli replied as follows:—
DEAR SIR: Your letter of June 22 and document dated July 12 came duly to hand. The enclosed copy of the encyclical letter of our holy father is, I think, the most fitting reply I can make.
The encyclical addresses princes and peoples, calling them back into the Roman Catholic Church. The answer to the Methodists who ask for liberty in South America from papal persecution is in substance “come back into the Roman Catholic Church and you can have it.” Methodists, and all lovers of equal liberty, will spurn such an answer. But it is the same answer which persecuted Seventh-day Adventists are receiving in Maryland, and elsewhere, from Methodists. When the Seventh-day Adventist asks freedom from Methodist persecution the answer is, “Keep Sunday and you can have it.” That is, come back to the practice of our church’s view of the Sabbath and the persecution will cease.
SPEAKING recently in Allegheny, Pa., on “Law versus Lawlessness,” Rev. J. S. Hutson, pastor of the Nixon Street Baptist Church, said:—
The many labor troubles in this country are not conflicts between capital and labor, but conflicts between intelligent Christian citizenship and ignorance, vice and anarchy. In those days when they had no king in Israel every man did what was right in his own eyes. God was their king and the principle of subjection was religious, but the people generally were irreligious. The same thing has been true in all ages and is emphatically true to-day. The race of man, apart from Christ and Christianity, is unwilling to be governed by just and wise laws. Well, we know the result of a strike for a larger liberty and higher wages. The result has always been the same. It is strange that men should be so slow to learn and so ready to forget the meaning of those old-time phrases, “Thou Shalt” and “Thou Shalt Not.”
In olden times God himself was the lawgiver and king, and every man was personally responsible to him for his conduct. The purpose of Christ and Christianity is to bring man back into subjection and under the authority of God.
And the speaker might have added that it is the purpose of National Reformers and American Sabbath Unionists to accomplish this, not by the preaching of the gospel and by getting men converted, but by civil law; and that the authority of God to which they propose to bring men, is the authority of God as interpreted by these pseudo-reformers; and that under their proposed régime men are not to be personally responsible to God, but to civil rulers for the discharge of their duties to God. These so-called reformers want to share with Leo XIII. the “regency of God on earth.” Is Mr. Hutson one of them? or is he a true Baptist?