Character of Sunday Legislation

It has been mentioned here, I mention it further, and shall dwell upon it perhaps more, and that is, that it is religious legislation, and can not be made anything else. For fifteen hundred and ninety-six years Sunday legislation has been religious legislation, and nothing else, with no pretense of anything else; and now, I submit to this Committee, that when the thing has for 1,596 years been nothing hut religious legislation, it can not be changed all of a sudden by somebody saying that it is something else.RJSB 12.1

Some history of the legislation proposed in this bill has been referred to, carrying it back to 1904. I think the real history of it goes back twenty-two years. Twenty-one years ago last December there was a public hearing before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor. I was there then; and the Sunday legislation then was the First of the modern stripe. The Sunday legislation then was not only specifically religious, but specifically “Christian.” But from then until now, as it has been followed up, it has been stripped of some of its religious phraseology, but not all.RJSB 12.2

This bill has been stripped as far as they possibly could to leave it in any respect at all what they wanted. But yet they did not get it all out, although they have done their best.RJSB 13.1