How changed the political sky to-day from what it was when these words began to be spoken! Now, thoughtful men are pondering whether, after all, these things may not be so. They see a powerful organization looming up in the country, which appends to the call for their conventions the names of some of the most influential men in the land. They hear them declaring in so many words, that what they are determined to do is to sweep away the constitutional barrier between them and a coerced observance of Sunday, so that all may be compelled to regard it as sacred. What we want, say they, and what we are determined to have, is such an amendment of the Constitution, 1. That it shall recognize God and Christ; 2. That it shall enable us to secure the reading of the Bible in the common schools; 3. That we may be enabled to enforce the better observance of the Christian Sabbath, _i. e._, Sunday. These declarations, a few years since, would have appalled every lover of constitutional liberty. Every man and woman imbued with a proper sense of the genius of our institutions would have been struck with horror at the very thought of pursuing the course in question. But a change has come over the spirit of the land. Steadily, the advocates of a day which has no authority in the word of God are drifting where all before them have done who have sought to maintain a human institution upon the claim of divine authority. It is idle for them to say at this stage of the proceedings that they propose to regard the rights of those who have conscientious scruples on this subject. God has said that the matter will culminate in oppression; nay, even though this were not so, reason itself would prove that this would be the case. Without questioning the sincerity of the men who at the present make these statements, we appeal to that very sincerity for the evidence that this matter will end just where the Seventh-day Adventists have claimed that it would. They have convinced themselves that they are called of God to a mighty work. They believe that they have a noble mission. They are men of mind and nerve. But, when a few months shall have revealed the insufficiency of their logic, when Seventh-day Baptists and Seventh-day Adventists shall have confronted them with a plain “Thus saith the Lord,” against their favorite scheme, they would be more than human if—refusing to yield to arguments which they cannot answer—they should continue to look with complacence upon the very men who, after all, will prove to be their most formidable antagonists in the great conflict. In fact, it would be a denial of both nature and history to say that they would not at last come to regard them in the light of enemies of God, really more worthy of condemnation and coercion than those who were simply unbelievers in any Sabbath at all, and so incapable of standing before the systematic effort which they have set in motion.[2]