Sabbath And Sunday

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 18, 1889

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 4, No. 34.

Sabbath And Sunday.

The “American Sabbath Union” wants a law enacted to enforce abstention from labor on Sunday. Though the Union itself professes to observe the day as a religious duty, in compliance with the command of the Almighty, as given through Moses, it wishes the State to command its observance as “a rest day” solely as a measure of secular policy, for the physical and moral well-being of the body of the people. Observed in this way, however, Sunday will not be a sacred day. It will merely be a holiday, and this, in fact, with very great numbers, is its significance now.

Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, in his sermons on the subject, says: “The right arm of the Union’s work is to promote the religious Sabbath, the left arm is to preserve the civil Sabbath. The religious Sabbath treats Sunday work and dissipation as sins against God; the civil Sabbath considers them only as crimes against man.” This is not an ingenuous way of putting the statement. It is found impossible to enforce the doctrine that non-observance of Sunday is a sin against God, and now there is an effort to gain the point through indirection, by making failure to keep Sunday as a day of rest a crime against man.

But if the State is not to enforce observance of Sunday as a sacred day, it cannot possibly make non-observance of Sunday a crime. It can appoint Sunday as a day of weekly rest, a holiday after the manner of other holidays; but if the day of weekly rest stands on this ground it may be observed or not, as persons may or may not wish to observe it. We have now many holidays, but their observance is merely voluntary. The State, unless it forms an alliance with the church to declare non-observance of Sunday a sin against God, has no more ground for its command to men to rest on the Sunday holiday than on the Christmas holiday; and, in fact, since the requirements of modern life make it desirable, and even necessary, that many activities shall continue without interruption of holidays or rest days, the people, or a majority of them, would not want the proposed Sunday law enforced, and hence it would not be enforced. A great many persons now rest on Sundays; some rest on other days of the week, as convenience or opportunity allows; and a great many of us would rest not only one day in the week, but seven days in the week, if we could. Necessity, in one form or another, drives most of us to work and keeps us at it. From this necessity the State never can relieve us. We rest when we can, and work because we can’t help it.

The Christian world has changed the sacred day, the day of rest, from Saturday to Sunday. For this change there is not even the semblance of divine authority that appears in the sanction of the Jewish Sabbath. Nowhere in the New Testament is the substitution of Sunday for Saturday as “the Sabbath” authorized or enjoined. The first day of the week, or Sunday, is mentioned only eight times in the New Testament, and in none of the texts is there the least hint that the day was sacred, or was thereafter to be so considered. In one place in the New Testament mention is made of a religious meeting held on the first day of the week. But throughout the New Testament the seventh day of the week is uniformly called the Sabbath, and there is no command for the observance of the first day of the week as a holy or sacred day. The authority for such observance rests partly on a usage of the early church, but chiefly on a decree of the Emperor Constantine who, in the year 321, when that union was made between Church and State which the world has ever since been trying to sever, ordained the union of the worship of Christ with the worship of Apollo, and commanded “rest on the venerable day of the sun.”

Sun worship, symbolized by the worship of Apollo as the god of the sun, was common throughout the Roman empire. The first day of the week, or Sunday, was the day devoted to this heathen worship. This form of idolatry was almost universal throughout the ancient world. In Gibbon’s History, chapter 20, we read: “The devotion of Constantine was peculiarly directed to the genius of the sun, the Apollo of Greek and Roman mythology; and he was pleased to be represented by the symbols of the god of light and poetry. The unerring shafts of that deity, the brightness of his eyes, his laurel wreath, immortal beauty and elegant accomplishments, seemed to point him out as the patron of a young hero. The altars of Apollo were covered with the votive offerings of Constantine; and the credulous multitude were taught to believe that the emperor was permitted to behold with mortal eyes the visible majesty of their tutelar deity; and that, either waking or in a vision, he was blessed with the auspicious omens of a long and virtuous reign. The sun was universally accepted as the invincible guide and protector of Constantine.”

The emperor, therefore, commanded the observance of the day devoted to the worship of the sun, not as the Sabbath, which it was not, but under its old astronomical and heathen title, Dies Solis, or the day of the sun, which it was. It was a

piece of statecraft, designed as a means of uniting the worship of Christ with the worship of Apollo, and Constantine stamped on his coins the name of one and the image of the other. The idea was to create harmony in the empire by making it appear that the religions differed little from each other, and were in fact essentially the same.

Historically, therefore, the observance of Sunday is an outgrowth of sun worship. Having seen the origin of the observance of the seventh day of the week as a holy day, the manner of the change from the seventh day to the first day and the reasons therefor, we may be able to get a juster estimate of the assertion that it is a sin against God to do anything on Sundays for which our ecclesiastical teachers have not granted us a dispensation. The other part of the argument, that men work too assiduously and therefore that a weekly rest day should be ordained by law, may seem to superficial observation quite another thing; but in fact it has its origin in a desire to cause the State to support the church in the claim that non-observance of Sunday is a sin against God. But for this and for their desire to have the day all their own, the ministers of our “Sabbath Union” would care little whether working people had one day’s rest in the week, or not. Very probably they would even exhort us against the sin of idleness, should we propose a rest-day for ourselves.—Portland Daily Oregonian, August 2, 1889.