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Show THE AMERICAN SABBATH <br><br> The New York Sabbath Committee, which is an unsectarian organization, composed of several well-known gentlemen of different denominations, held a meeting Sunday evening at Association Hall, attracting an audience that completely filled the large room. The chairman of the committee, Mr. Norman White, presided and interesting speeches were made by Richard W. Thompson, Secretary, [unreadable lines] Andrews, Mr. W. W. Atterbury, the secretary of the committee, and Mr. White. Secretary Thompson was received with applause. He said that in listening to the eloquent tribute of the preceding speaker to the greatness of our country he could not help asking himself the question, How did it become so? We have seen the other nations of the earth struggling for centuries through difficulties and embarrassments, and yet they have not reached the point in grandeur which we in one century have so gloriously gained. How did all this come about? The answer is plain. Our fathers brought with them across the briny deep the Holy Word of God. (Applause) Herein is the mystery, if there be any mystery about our grandeur and greatness. It is the Bible that has made us great. We are a Christian people, entertaining diverse views, practicing different forms of worship, but tracing all our faith to that great fundamental law given to us amid the thunder and lightning of Sinai - that God made the Sabbath day for man, not for himself. He needs no rest; He is a spiritual being - a pure essence. But when he created us of material substances - of bones, muscles, nerves and fibers - He taught us that we do not possess the power of incessant labor. <br><br> I take it there is no principle better fixed in the American mind than the determination to insist upon the conformity by foreigners to our Sunday legislation. We are a Sabbath-keeping people. (Applause.) Men say that we have no power to interfere with the natural right of individuals - that a man may spend Sunday as he pleases. But society has a right to make laws for its own protection. They are not religious laws. The men engaged in the grand work of securing the enforcement of the Sabbath laws do not want to force you into any church, for these gentlemen represent all denominations. They want to make you observe the Sabbath day as a day of rest merely - peaceably if they can, forcibly if they must, only so far as it is necessary to protect society. Destroy the Sabbath and you go out of light into darkness. A government without the Sabbath as a civil institution could not stand long enough to fall. (Applause.) Why are we so especially interested in Sabbath laws? Because there is no other government that depends so much on the morality of its citizens as ours. Here, where we have a republic with its existence depending upon the mass of the people, it is necessary to have a general observance of the Sabbath. (Applause.) Our national life may depend upon it. We may quarrel to any reasonable extent on anything else - about banks and the tariff - perhaps we could do without both; but the American people will never give up its Sabbath. Mr. Thompson concluded with an eloquent picture of the beneficent effects to the workingman of the Sabbath at home with his wife and family, and closed with a stirring appeal to the assemblage to do everything to preserve what has come to be known in Europe as "the American Sabbath." He had come to New York, not to make a speech, but because he has been interested in this cause and has been a worker for it for thirty years, and he earnestly added that he intended to work for it for thirty years to come. - N. Y. Herald. |