Arizona silver belt., 1893-04-08
BLUE LAWS IN rExxsYLAAxIA.

ouuudN AR lttSputb huu u lidA dtrSSt, in the same city for hauling newspapers to a railroad train on Sunday. The fine and arrest are due to the continued existence of Sunday blue law passed in 1794 An attempt was lately made to ameRd this act so as to conform 1t to the conditions of the present, but the legislative committee Tn charge of the bill reported against its passage.
 Can 1t be that the executives of the law regard newspapers as emissaries of the devil, or is it the fees attending arrest and trial that awaken officers of the law to resurrect statute that has been regarded as dead from almost the dgte of its birth? The proclamation of the Sabbath, not alone in Pennsylva- mia, was regarded an abomination in the sight of the Lord Offenders were placed under the judicial harrow in the colonies at a time when their govern ments were a theocracy, an intimate union of the soul with God, in coAtem- plation.
 Sabbath-breaking was placed on o level with murder. Then the stocks and the wooden cage were in frequent tse, Scolds and railers were set on a ducking- stool and dipped over head and ears ehree times, in running water. Garrulous women who presumed to ex- pound the scriptures were silenced with s cleft stick applied to their tongues. In l649 Thomas Scott was sentenced for some offence, to learn the cate chism, or be fined ten shillings, and after due consideration he paid the fine. Sometimes offenders, with Q refinement of cruelty, were obliged to go and talk Do bke elders. It was on the statute, that if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young woman without the consent of her parents, or in the absence of consent of the county court, he was first fined and then imprisoned for a repetition of the offence. 4 new etymology for the word "courting. Yet who can say that those agonizing laws wholly shut ont the trivial enjoy ments of daily life when sack, white wiHe and cider were voted, in 1885, as admissible, with that ensnaring acces- sory, sugar, at public funerals,
 It is strange how few years are re- quired to make a usage seem ancestral. Who now remembers that our progeA itors, for more than a century. dis cussed religion on both the solemn oc- oasioRs of marriages and funerals Magistrates alone could perform the marriage ceremony. Prayer was abso- lutsly prohibited at funerals, as was also doRe by Calvin at Geneva by John Knox is Scotland, by the English Puritans in the Westminster Assembly, and by the French Hugenots. The bell might toll, the friends might walk, two by two, to the grave, but there must be no prayer uttered The secret was, that the traditions of the English and Roman churches must be set aside. Even the origin of the New England custom of eatiRg salt fish on Saturday is ascribed to the fact that Roman Catholics eat them on Friday.
 The practice of wedding discourses prevailed as late as the last century, and sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into startling leyitiss. For instance, when Parson Smiths daugh. ter Mary was about to marry, the father permitted the saintly maiden to decide on her own text for the sermon, and she meekly selected "Mary hath chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her, and the dis course was duly pronounced. But when her wild young sister was bent on marrying John Adams, whom her father disliked. and would not even invite to dinner, she boldly suggested for her text, "John came, neither eating bread ner drinking wine, and yo spy he hath a devil. But no sermon stands re- corded under that prefix Neyerthe- less, Abby became the wife of the second President of the United States and mother of the sixth.
 After the lapse of more than cen tury when Abraham Tyler blew his hora at Hayorhill for half an hour each succeeding Sunday, calling sinners to repentance, where they would be in range of moral truth and could be pep pered from the pulpit, for which ser yics he received half pound of pork yearly from every family in the village, it seems strange that we find the smoky city as puritanical as that Yankee vil- lage at hat remote age, and as guard ed iron the allurements of sin, the chief of which is the circulation of worldly neNssfrsners on Sunday.
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 A Washington dispatch to the Globe Democrat, under the caption, 'Dele- gate Smith hit again." says: Things