The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-01-09
DR. DICKINSON ON SABBATH, CIVIL AND
 ECCLESIASTICAL
Says It Is Perversion of Civil Sabbath to Which
 Pastors Object
7o the Editor of The Age Herald:

tnaC honor. Second, the said pr. Dick inson is not leader in this particular movement against the granting of spe- cial indulgences to the movie mer- chants on Sundays, but the Rev. Dr.. Whitten, is the chairman of that com mittee. Third, the homilies written by the said Dr. Dickinson were com posed and given to the public not at his own initiative, but by special and formal request from the Baptist Pas tors conference of this city. Fourth, the Pastors union never has proposed Ito educate the people of our beautf- ful city up to the ideas of the Puritan Sabbath" as your correspondent would have known had he been present when the matter was being considered or taken any other reasonable way of in forming himself.
 What these pastors seek to educate the people in is not the Puritan Sab Lutheran, nor the Romanist, nor the Judaistic, nor the Babylonian, nor any other ecclesiastical Sabbath, but only In the American Sabbath as it stands in our present living civiliza- tion. a civil Sabbath.
 Fifth, the effort to exploit this man of straw, 'the poor working man." to secure some special exemption for the movie merchant, or to strike a blow at the American Sabbath in it's con- test with the mediaeva1 Sabbath of ecclesiasticism, is too potent perver- sion to fool anybody into condemning g the pastors involved for the reason that the said ir, boir own hocks the majority of the work ing men of this city, and know them personally as your eX-rector cannot, and they know that this patronizing pitying of them is heartily resented by them, and they ask nothing so much as to be respected and regarded as independent, self-respecting men with heads of their own.
 Pardon just a word more about the ecclesiastical Sabbath of "the Bible, the encyclopedia and the church his- tories" and our modern American civil Sabbath, for your correspondent seems to have things a little mixed here. The American civil Sabbath has no more connection with the Puritan Sabbath than with the Anglican, the Continen- tai, the Romanist, or the Jewish, or any other ecclesiastical Sabbath. It did not spring up in Massachusetts colony, but in a Rhode Island colony, for it cannot live apart from the sepa- ration of church and state, and the grant of religious liberty Hence, it has had no existence in Europe until recent days, nor was it fully Amer icanized until after the constitution granted religious liberty and separa- tion of church and state to the people Of this country. It must have "a free church in a free state" to exist; and the Puritan Sunday never had this, but ec- clesiasticized the Sabbath, as it did everything else According to the American Sabbath the state has no right to enact Sunday laws of a posi- tive nature prescribing how the day is to be spent but only to make it a dies non within it's own Jurisdiction, in order that the people may have op- portunity for the enjoyment of their personal and social rights and religious culture, according to the dictates of their own consciences.
 The Puritan, no more than the Anglican before Charles ID, or the German Luther ans, or the Romansts, or the Jewish, did this; but on the contrary it followed the old Medieval ecclesiastical Sabbath n making it dies sanctus by express stat utory provision against profanation' The Sabbath of the Jews, originally a purely civil Sabbath, came to be an ecclesiasti- cal one after the exile and so in the later
 
 tico-civil, being both dies non in world ly business and dies sanctus in religion. As such Jesus kept it, both civilly and re- ligiously; and he specially commended 1t as a human institution, made for man, and expressly under the lordship of the son of man. After his resurrection, and between his resurrection and ascension. he instituted the Lords Day, as the day of worship with his disciples; but these last continued to observe the Jewish Sabbath as a civil Sabbath in all Jewish commu- mites where it was a legal institution, until Constantine, 3l2, and Theodosius II. 425, and the Council of Orleans, in the next century, made Sunday the civil Sab- bath Since then the Christian world has had the benefit of the civil Sabbath on the same day as their sacred Sabbath; and they soon came to overlook the dis tinction between the two, which had been sso patent when they came on different days.
 Owing to this failure to distinguish the civil and the ecclesiastical Sabbaths, both coming on the same day, and owing to the decline of the civil powers and the rise of the ecclesiastical in absorbing the civil functions, the day was ecclesiastical; and hence the ecclesiastical Sabbath came into Christianity, as it cid into post exilic Judaism, greatly to the prejudice O. the civil one. In establishing the sep aration of church and state in America it became necessary for the civil Sabbath, over which the state had jurisdiction, to b., severed from the ecclesiastical or re- ligious, which belonged to the people as reserved rights ,and thus there came again into social consciousness the exist erce of the two institutions belonging to separate jurisdictions. As dies sanctus. if is a day of the greatest liberty to each person or group of persons to express -their own conscientious convictions and promote their own culture of life with none to molest or make afraid, so far as the state is concerned bur as dies non for business of worldly nature, except in matters of necessity and mercy. 1t IS forbidden to all (except such as have, got ten special grant of exemption. like the movie merchants and a few others in this city). The ecclesiarchs or the middle ages and the Puritans, when they got con trol of the civil power, used 1t to erect some special privilege for their special cult by duress of law; the movie mer- chants in Birmingham, when they got con- trol of the commission, did the same thing. It is to this perverson Of the civii Sabbath to which the pastors are taxing exception. A. J. DlShi->'NA
 Birmingham January s, 19l6.