Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1889-08-19
Reliaiol1s department.
Intimate Relations with Popular
Liberty.

3
Liberty.
If any one doubts the intimate re
/ lations of the Christian Sabbath tt
popular liberty, let him compare those
nations whose Sabbath is a sacred
day with others whose day of weekly
rest is holiday. How much of pop.
ular government is there in the worlo
outside of Switzerland, England
Scotland, the British colonies and
the United States? And these are
the lands in which the Sabbath is
most commonly observed as holy
day. France has hithereto struggled
in vain for civil liberty, and France
has no sacred day. And it is signi-
ficant that now when her republic is
giving some promise of permanence,
there is springing up a remarkable
religious reformation, inaugurated,
not by representative of any church,
but by French patriots. who saw in
a national revival of true religion
the only guarantee of popular liberty,
because religion alone affords ade-
quate motive to individual self gov
eminent.
That illustrious French statesman
Count Montalembert once said ::
'EMen are surprised sometimes by
the ease which the immens city of
London is kept in order by a garrison
of three small battalions and two
squadrons (less than three thousand
men), while to control the capital of
France, which is half the size, forty
thousand troops of the line and six
ty thousand national guards are nee
essary. But the stranger who ar
rives in London on Sunday morning,
when he sees everything of commerce
suspended in that gigantic capital in
obedience to God when in the CEN
ter of that colossal business he finds
silence and repose scarcely interrupt
ed by the bells which call to prayer,
and by the immense crowds on their
way to church, then his establishment
ceases. He understands that there
icfi
pie beside that made by bayonets,
and that when the law of God is full
filled with such a solemn submissive
ness, God himself, if l dare use the
words, charges himself with the po-
lice arrangements
William III. Seward wrote II need
not assure you that every days ex-
perience confirms the opinion that
the ordinances which require the OBJ
servance of one day in seven, and
the Christian faith which hallows it,
are our chief security for civil and
religious liberty, for temporal bless
ings and spiritual hopes"
/ think it was Mailman who said
ga holiday Sabbath is the ally of
despotism. So commonly has this
truth been recognized that it has
passed into a popular proverb that
s'the Sabbath is the bulwark of free
institutions.
Let no man attack the Sabbath, or
the laws thrown around it, in the
name of liberty. Its enemies should
march under the black flag of license
or the flaming standards of anarchy.
All laws may be said to limit individ-
ual liberty, but just laws restrain
each in the interest of all they draw
the circumscribing line only where
the liberty of one overlaps that of
many. Hence law, in a much larg-
er sense, is the guardian of liberty.
This is true of our Sabbath laws.
Whatever can be said against them,
as infringing personal liberty, may
be urged with greater force against
our common school laws; they rest
on the same foundgtion and are alike,
pillars of our free institutions.
The necessity then of q civil Sab
bath and of adequate laws to protect
it should create public sentiment
which will demand wise Sabbath leg
islation and which will abundantly
sustain the law.