ORIGIN AND RESULTS OF SUNDAY LEGISLATION, n 



ORIGIN AND RESULTS OF SUNDAY LEGISLATION. 



By Eev. A. H. LEWIS, D. D. 



THE times demand a reconsideration of our Sunday laws. They 

 are practically inoperative. There must be some essential reason 

 for this, in the character of the people or in the character of the 

 laws ; perhaps both. Either the laws have a false basis, and can not 

 rightly claim public regard, or the people are wickedly indifferent to 

 rightful authority. This is true of the Church as well as the " world." 

 To know the origin of these laws will help to solve the problem. 



Sun-worship is the oldest and most wide-spread form of paganism. 

 It reaches back to the prehistoric period. Under various phases it 

 has always been the persistent foe to the worship of Jehovah. It was 

 the prevailing and most corrupting form of idolatry which assailed 

 the Hebrew nation. Its lowest form, Baal-worship, produced the deep- 

 est social and moral degradation. As the period of idolatry passed 

 away, sun-worship assumed a less materialistic form, without losing 

 the virulence of its poison. It lay in waiting, like a beast of prey, to 

 corrupt Christianity, as it had already corrupted Judaism. Trans- 

 ferred from the East, and from Egypt, to Greece and Rome, it be- 

 came popular, and great efforts were made under Heliogabalus and 

 others, in the third and fourth centuries, to exalt it above all other 

 religions. Indeed, Mithraicism came near gaining the field and driving 

 apostolic religion out of the Roman Empire. It did corrupt it to an 

 extent little understood. 



Pagan Rome made religion a part of the state. Long before the 

 advent of Christianity, the emperor, as head of the state and there- 

 fore of the Church — Pontifex Maximus — was accustomed to legislate 

 upon all religious matters. He had supreme power in this direction. 

 Scores of sacred days were set apart, under the pagan empire, upon 

 which judicial proceedings and certain forms of work were prohibited. 

 It was the settled policy of the empire for the emperor thus to de- 

 termine concerning ferial days. Apostolic Christianity forbade all 

 appeal to the civil law in matters of Christian duty. Christ and his 

 apostles sought only the rights of citizenship at the hand of civil 

 government. "When these were refused, they gladly yielded, suffering 

 persecution, unto death, if need be. Christ repeatedly declared, " My 

 kingdom is not of this world." New Testament Christianity could not 

 have instituted such a cultus as that which gave rise to Sunday legis- 

 lation, the union of church and state, under an emperor or an emperor- 

 pope. " Old Mixon " peach-trees can not bear crab-apples. All civil 

 legislation concerning religious faith and practice, such as obtained in 

 the Roman Empire, was the product of paganism. It was not an off- 

 shoot of Christianity, or of the Hebrew theocracy. 



