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 i udary 25, 1889.
 
 Sabbath Legislation and Personal Liberty. 
 
 LECTURE BY THE REV. DR. DAVID PHILIPSON. 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : 
 
 Periodically there breaks out in this country an excited 
 feeling that puts those whom it affects into a high state of 
 delirium, in which condition they see and imagine things 
 in a very distorted light, and feel that unless they do some- 
 thing to recall the people from their waywardness and save 
 them from the evil courses whereinto they have fallen, 
 the souls of millions will be lost forever and eternally. At 
 this period such a feeling is again asserting its sway and 
 is well nigh at its height. Some time ago, a movement known 
 as the Sabbath Reform Movement was started in the East, 
 and with a great blow of trumpets it was announced that 
 a monster petition, signed by hundreds of thousands of 
 names, was to be presented to Congress, demanding that 
 the highest legislative body of the country pass measures en- 
 forcing a strictobservance of the Sunday, forbidding all pleas- 
 ures and amusements, prohibiting work of each and every 
 kind, in short making of the first day of the week a time of 
 enforced worship, of somberness and of gloom. 
 
 The object of the whole movement is to reinstate the 
 Puritan Sunday with all its darkness and heaviness, to force 
 all the citizens of this country without distinction of individ- 
 ual belief, creed or preference to participate in the observ- 
 ance of such a day ; in short to overthrow one of the bul- 
 warks of our constitution, and hence undermine that per- 
 sonal liberty which is the condition and the safe-guard of 
 our grand and glorious institutions. This whole matter
 
 assumes fresh interest for us from two articles that appeared 
 in the daily press during the past week, the one reporting 
 a movement emanating from the Evangelical Alliance of 
 this city, the other from the German Society naming itself 
 " Der Bund f uer Freiheit und Rscht." The two take diamet- 
 rically opposite positions on the question and I feel it 
 necessary that we also as Jews, who belong neither to the 
 one wing nor the other, except in so far as we are all citizens 
 of this one great land, that we as the Jews of this community 
 now that the agitation has also reached this city, that we 
 as Jews, the confessors of the religion that gave the Sabbath 
 as the day of religious observance to the world, although as 
 a day of rest it was known already among other peoples in 
 ancient times, have our word in this most interesting, nay, 
 not only interesting, but vital discussion, vital in as far as it 
 affects the very bone and sinew of the body constitutional of 
 theUnited States. The afore-mentioned Evangelical Alliance 
 we are informed is now also busying itself in securing signa- 
 tures to a petition to organize a committee of five hundred 
 to secure the nomination and election of officers in this cityi 
 who will pledge themselves to enforce all the Sunday laws 
 of whatever character they may be, or as the facetious news- 
 paper scribe expressed it, 'Sunday laws, blue, red and other.' 1 
 For this purpose a meeting has been called for next Monday 
 evening, to effect a permanent organization. On the other 
 hand, the Bund fuer Freiheit und Recht also held a meeting 
 during the past week and appointed a committee to draft 
 resolutions protesting against the Sunday Bills introduced 
 by Senator Blair into the Senate. These resolutions are to 
 be framed in accordance with the spirit of a circular issued 
 by the North American Turner Bund, some of the striking 
 sentences of which I will cite. After calling attention to 
 the measures of Mr. Blair, the so-called National Sunday 
 Bill and the concurrent resolution proposing an amend- 
 ment to the Federal Constitution, the object of which seems 
 to be the establishment of the Christian religion as a na- 
 tional religion, the circular goes on to use some strong and
 
 3 
 
 apposite expressions of which the following are a few: " We 
 consider these propositions as an infringement of the lib- 
 erty of conscience and a violation of the spirit of our con. 
 stitution." * * * "In our judgment it is a matter of 
 necessity, charity and humanity to permit the laborer, after 
 six days of hard work, to enjoy recreation on the seventh." 
 * Taking it all in all, the bill is the boldest assault 
 upon the political liberty of our people yet attempted." 
 * " By a law proposed by Mr. Blair, a purely religious 
 custom would be made an institution, recognized by the 
 State, in violation of the letter and spirit of the constitu- 
 tional provisions." * * * " The majority of our citizens 
 know what endless complications the sacrifice of those 
 provisions of our constitution which guarantee the liberty 
 of conscience and religion to our citizens would lead to, and 
 we therefore deem it our duty to protest against such 
 reactionary assaults upon our institutions." Such are the 
 two wings of thought as they stand upon this question- 
 Let us attempt a clear and dispassioned consideration of 
 the matter necessary as it now is, from the fact that such 
 active propaganda toward the furtherance of the measure 
 are now beginning to be made in our midst. 
 
 On a smaller scale, there have many a time and oft, been 
 attempts made in separate communities to enforce the so- 
 called Sunday blue laws,which, an inheritance from the Pur- 
 itans were observed in the New England States during the 
 past century, and enforced in accordance with the strict 
 spirit of these statutes; blue laws, the effect of whose spirit 
 appears in the following section taken from the laws 
 regulating the management of Harvard College in the 
 year 1734: "All the scholars shall at sunset in the evening 
 preceding the Lard's day, retire to their chambers and not 
 unnecessarily leave them ; and all disorders on said even- 
 ing shall be punished as violations of the Sabbath are, and 
 every scholar on the Lord's day shall carefully apply him- 
 self to the duties of religion and piety, and whosoever shall 
 profane said day by unnecesary business or visiting, walk-
 
 4 
 
 ing on the Common or in the streets or fields in the town of 
 Cambridge, or by any sort of diversion before sunset, shall 
 be punished." Delectable laws and customs of this sort it 
 is the earnest pleasure and desire of the present Sunday 
 agitators to introduce. The reason of the greater attention 
 paid to the present movement and the greater alarm it ex- 
 cites is the fact that for the first time it has definitely as- 
 sumed national proportions. Senator Blair, who appears to 
 have the stuff of a fanatic in him, if we can judge from the 
 exhibitions he has given of himself both on the Senate floor 
 and elsewhere, that he has appeared as the supporter of 
 well nigh every eccentric movement wherein this country 
 seems to be especially productive, set the ball a rolling by 
 his Sunday bill and at once, as though at a given signal, 
 this small beginning, fathered by the New England Sen- 
 ator, grew into vast proportions, meetings were called in 
 many places and the agitation kept up, 8 national conven- 
 tion assembled and a complete organization for the accom- 
 plishment of the purposes of the bill effected. One 
 preacher of New York City even resigned his large pas- 
 torate to accept the position of Field Secretary and devote 
 himself entirely to the work. The provisions of Senator 
 Blair's Bill are, as you may remember, most stringent. It 
 prohibits all sorts of pleasures on the Sunday. No work 
 whatever is to be performed under penalty of heavy fines ; 
 only works of necessity, charity and humanity are exempted. 
 It further prohibits the carrying of the mail, all traffic by land 
 and water, the running of railroad trains, street-cars and 
 ferry-boats,all work, as it puts it, that tends to disturb a relig- 
 ious observance of the Sabbath. This whole movement arises 
 from a misconception of the meaning of a day of rest ; it is 
 entirely out of consonance with the spirit of our time and of 
 our land and its aim is to overthrow personal liberty and 
 bring to pass a consummation, which by many bigots, has 
 been since the formation of the government regarded 
 one to be devoutly wished for, namely, to have the 
 United States considered a Christian land and a Christian
 
 5 
 
 government. We will consider this question in two 
 lights first, in an historical one, as to the import of the 
 Sabbath and the meaning of the designation, a day of rest, 
 and secondly, in its effects upon the personal liberty of 
 our citizens and upon the significance and stability of the 
 ideas of government and the relation between church and 
 state as conceived and so gloriously achieved by the 
 methods here in vogue, guaranteed and necessitated by the 
 spirit of our Constitution. 
 
 It is not necessary here to go into the question of the 
 origin of the Sabbath idea. Sufficient to say that the cel- 
 ebration of one day of rest in every seven, as now prevalent 
 among all civilized nations, came from the Jews, for whom 
 it was embodied in the fourth commandment. To rest 
 one day in seven is a necessity for man, a necessity for the 
 human constitution. During the period of the French Rev- 
 olution when the idea prevailed that everything of the past 
 was useless and harmful and injurious merely because it was 
 past, when the wisdom and the reason of institutions was 
 not at all entered into, but men, intoxicated with the spirit of 
 liberty, which unbridled, readily turned into license, threw 
 overboard all the traditions of the past, this day of rest 
 in every seven was abolished too, and merely to make a 
 difference a law was passed that every tenth day be the pe- 
 riod whereon to abstain from labor. It was however soon 
 found to be impracticable, neither human beings nor an- 
 imals could endure it, and the wise thought, founded on the 
 very nature of things was returned to, and the seventh 
 day of rest was again instituted. 
 
 Now what was the position of the Jews toward this 
 day of rest? Are the advocates of the day of gloom follow- 
 ing out the tradition of the people of old from whom the 
 Sabbath idea as now held, came? No, not by any means. 
 True, no manual labor was permitted, although even here 
 there is a difference of opinion as R. Akiba held, that if 
 necessary, work could be performed on the Sabbath. But a 
 day of gloom it never was. It was a time of happiness, of
 
 joy and of helpfulness in every Jewish community. The 
 prophet called the Sabbath an Oneg, an enjoyment. It 
 was in truth for them a day of rest, of rest for the soul and 
 rest for the body. Now what means rest? It means not 
 idleness, it means not sloth. Rest means the abstention 
 from the usual occupation and the turning of the attention 
 to something else. If a man is hard at work all week 
 physically, recreation means for him rest ; aye it is for 
 him a necessity. If a man is mentally engaged all the 
 while, then physical occupation is for him rest. The Puri- 
 tanic notion of somberness, of gloom, of darkness, is not 
 Jewish. The Friday evening was devoted to the enjoy- 
 ment in the family circle, when cheer and joy ruled the 
 hour ; the Sabbath morning was given to prayer and com- 
 munion with their God, the afternoon to various and varied 
 pleasures, among others the pleasure of indulging the 
 kindly feelings of the heart, occupations such as visiting the 
 sick and the poor. Not even the untold fears and anxieties 
 and terrors arising from oppression and persecution could 
 abolish the Sabbath pleasure and the Sabbath joy ; no mat- 
 ter how bitter their outer life and how wretched their ma- 
 terial existence, at that hour and at that day, all else was 
 forgotten in the supreme joy and pleasure of the mo- 
 ment, for however thick the darkness and gloom with- 
 without, all thought of this was thrown to the winds, and 
 within all was light and happiness and undisturbed pleas- 
 ure in every Jewish home, from hut to mansion. 
 
 Not among the Jews then can any justification for blue 
 laws be found. We must look elsewhere for that. In Eng- 
 land and Scotland where the harsh, hard and gloomy re- 
 ligion of Calvin, as interpreted by John Knox and his con- 
 feres in the one country and the Puritans in the other was 
 introduced, these stringent laws and regulations of Sabbath 
 observance took not. It was undoubtedly a reaction 
 against the free and easy life, the gaiety and the uncon- 
 ceruedness of the Catholic religion. In Catholic countries 
 the Sunday is given up to pleasures of every kind. The Cov-
 
 7 - 
 
 enanters and the Puritans in their bitter hatred of every- 
 thing that smacked of Popery, instituted that austerity 
 and chilling severity which made religion, not a source of 
 happiness and of expansion of the soul, but a depression 
 and a weight on the spirit, which made of the day of rest 
 a torturing of the senses and the flesh for twenty four 
 hours,from sundown on Saturday to sunset on Sunday. 
 Pleasures were prohibited and an interdict placed upon 
 enjoyment of every kind. Music, except the most lugu- 
 brious of church hyms, was foribdden, a walk in the green 
 fields to breathe in the fresh, pure air and enjoy the flow- 
 ers and the trees was a grievous sin, any indulgence of the 
 senses an iniquity in the sight of the Lord. A smile, God for 
 bid it! a cheerful, laughing tone that person was surely 
 in the power of the evil one. Long, sanctimonious faces, 
 harsh, unpleasant voices were a necessity to make the Sun 
 day holy ; not to move from the house except to go to the 
 meeting house and then to return, not to cheer, but to gloom. 
 This spirit and this idea of Sabbath observance were of 
 course brought to this country by the Puritans when they 
 left England for these virginal shores and settled what are 
 now the New England States. The so called blue laws 
 were entered upon the statute books and enforced in those 
 young communities, and all this present agitation is to re 
 introduce and re-establish those old laws formulated by a 
 perverted religious consciousness, which imagined that to 
 look sour and gram belonged to religion, that to rejoice 
 was a sin, that set up the thought that gloom is more pleas 
 urable to God than joy, and length and sourness of visage 
 more acceptable than brightness and cheer of countenance. 
 If religion is to do good unto man, it is to bring cheer and 
 joy into his life ; there is heaviness and sorrow enough 
 without imposing upon the human creature the onus of a 
 teaching that falsifies all the intention of a wise and 
 benevolent creator. No system ever generated more hy- 
 pocrisy than this one which forced human nature to act 
 against its own inclination, no system ever did more harm
 
 to the true conception of religion than did this which made 
 worship a funeral service and dampened every bright and 
 fresh inspiration in the human creature. It did very well 
 for its time when it could enforce its dictates, but its reign 
 is, thank God ! over. 
 
 There is more religion in throwing open the museums 
 of art, in having music in the public parks for the benefit 
 of the populace, in generating a spirit of sober cheer and joy- 
 fulness among the people on a Sunday afternoon, than in 
 compelling a forced abstention from all pleasure which will 
 not only defeat its purpose but lead to circumvention and by 
 pocrisy. Why not instead of hankering for a return of a false 
 and perverted system of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
 turies, which is impossible of faithful observance and which 
 rebels against every dictate of the human heart and every 
 demand of human nature, why not, instead of putting a prem- 
 ium on hypocrisy and upon infractions of every blue law that 
 shall be attempted to be enforced, why not advance the true 
 spirit of religion among the people and take advantage of 
 the natural bent of the mind and the heart by taking heed 
 of the many injunctions contained in the Bible that time 
 and again bids, serve God with joy, rejoice on thy feast, thou 
 and all with thee, be happy in thy family circle, ad- 
 vance the spirit of gladness and cheer among men. No 
 gloom, no darkness, no asceticism, but a religion of bright 
 ness, a day of brightness, whatever day is observed as the 
 day of rest, and the spirit of religiosity will be much more 
 furthered than by the secret violation of odious laws which 
 the legal prohibition of all pleasure must entail. Let be 
 remembered once and for all the word of old, the word 
 of one of those mighty preachers inspired of God, one of 
 those who understood human nature so well, when he said 
 and thou shalt call the Sabbath a pleasure, a day whereon 
 worship and rest shall be pleasure. 
 
 But that which more than anything else, should and 
 will militate against and make impossible the enactment 
 of any such laws as are contemplated by these Sabbath leg-
 
 idation movements, is the fact that they are entirely against 
 the spirit of our American institutions and violate the very 
 ground principles of our constitution. The warrant of the 
 continuance and the stability of this United States Gov- 
 ernment as such, is the strict observance and upholding of 
 the principle which has been the guiding star of its policy, 
 and that is the complete separation of Church and State. 
 
 To enforce upon every citizen of the country a com- 
 pulsory observance of any special day for religious service 
 or rest is completely subversive of personal liberty guaran. 
 teed by the founders of our Government and the grandest 
 and proudest prerogative of every man, woman and child 
 dwelling within the bounds of this land. To undertake to 
 regulate the free actions of any man, as long as they are not 
 subversive of the welfare of others, and as long as they are 
 completely within the bounds of what is generally con- 
 ceived to be right, is the characteristic of tyranny and not of 
 freedom. 
 
 There are within the United States hundreds of thou. 
 sands, aye perhaps millions, to whom the establishment of 
 any such laws as these bills purpose, means the infringe- 
 ment of free action as much as would a law forbidding free 
 speech and free thought; it is a noli me tangere for the 
 representative legislative body of a country, a clause of 
 whose constitution reads: " Congress shall make no law re- 
 specting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the 
 free exercise thereof !" All religious denominations are here 
 alike tolerated; what they do within their own confines is 
 the concern of no one, but when they wish to branch out and 
 force their peculiar views upon others, when they wish to 
 dictate what work the Government shall have done or shall 
 not have done, when they wish to command free individ- 
 uals, this may you do and this not, then must we cry, 
 Halt ! the assumptions you are taking are unwarranted; 
 you have no right to hamper the free actions of men to 
 make them harmonize with your forced interpretation of 
 the meaning of the Sabbath; bring your own to your
 
 10 
 
 churches, impress upon them how they shall act and then if 
 you succeed in convincing them of your notions, well and 
 good, but further than this you can not go, and all the agi- 
 tation will result in wind for there is still enough of the 
 spirit of freedom in this land to prevent any such action. 
 Let there be exceeding caution lest any one of the mighty 
 stones in the foundation of this Government, which have 
 made it the home of all men of whatever belief, creed, 
 thought, opinion they may have been and are, be moved, 
 lest the whole fabric whereon the ages have labored, for 
 our institutions are the outcome of the best in all past 
 times and countries, fall, and the grandest structure ever 
 contemplated and erected by human minds crumble into 
 ruin. 
 
 None too jealously can every portion of the constitution 
 that grants free action, free thought, free speech and free 
 worship, all of course within the bounds of right, be guarded 
 and every attempt at a subversion thereof be repelled by 
 all right-feeling and right-thinking men. Our own convic- 
 tions and our own beliefs may never make us blind to the 
 rights of others. None too strongly can every effort toward 
 the embodiment of any such clause in the constitution be 
 argued and struggled against by all who know and appreci- 
 ate what the liberty, the personal liberty that is here so 
 grandly realized, means, not only to the individual, but to 
 the world at large, for the true purpose of every such at- 
 tempt is always one and the same and leaks out inadver 
 tantly in a statement made in this bill that looks upon this 
 land as a Christian country. To this statement, or to this 
 thought I need not devote any arguments in contradiction, 
 for it is so against every intent and purpose of the country's 
 laws. 
 
 The churches must keep to themselves; Orthodox 
 Christianity, Unitarianism, Judaism, what you will, may 
 propagate its doctrines freely and undisturbed, but none 
 shall force its own peculiar tenets, doctrines, customs, 
 observances and thoughts upon the Government or any
 
 11 
 
 of its branches. In the eye of the Government one 
 religious faith must be as every other, one man as 
 every other. The history of past states shows only too 
 plainly the danger of identifying the State with any one 
 special form of religion, for the weal and welfare of man- 
 kind demand a complete separation lest the prejudices of 
 this one religion against all others cripple the workings of 
 the State and at once stamp it as unjust to all other relig- 
 ious persuasions. 
 
 " Religion should always be distinct from civil govern- 
 ment," said one of England's greatest statesmen. Let each 
 pursue its own path perfectly free and unhampered. The 
 original intention of the founders of this Government in 
 this respect can not be improved upon. In the nama of 
 an Almighty God, creator of all creatures alike, whose 
 souls, the impress of the divine, stamp them as equal, as far 
 as the right to live and be free is concerned; in the name 
 of mankind whose progress would be retarded for centur- 
 ies should any such retroactive measures as these Sunday 
 blue laws intend, be indeed incorporated into the statute 
 books, in the name of personal and individval liberty, 
 which in being deprived of any one of its rights is in dan- 
 ger of losing them all ; in the name of enlightened religion, 
 whose watchword is tolerance for all, we protest against 
 any attempt to force any such laws upon the Government 
 of this country, and we feel, we know that the great mass of 
 our people, Mitside of the comparitively few who would bind 
 the free consciences and actions of their fellows, protest 
 with us as they desire the furtherance of the spirit of toler- 
 ance, justice and truth. Amen !
 
 BLOCK PRINTING CO.
 
 UNIV. OF CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES
 
 
 

 
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