THE HUMAN ABOVE THE DIVINE.
There is a constant tendency, notable in both Church and State, especially in times of backsliding, to exalt human traditions, appointments, and institutions, above the Word and institutions of God's appointment. Here is an example of this from the chief organ of a leading religious denomination of this country:— “We do well to remember always that our feast of Thanksgiving is none other than the ancient Jewish Feast of Ingathering, and, tho our President now issues the yearly proclamation, yet, in the first instance, it was Moses who commanded the observance of this festival. By recalling this fact we link ourselves with the sublime past. We connect our nation with the nation through which God revealed himself to the world. We lift the day out of mere local or national limitations, and we prove that we too are the children of Abraham, only in that high and spiritual sense by which we are all of the household of faith. “Just as Easter has entered into, and with its divine light transfigured, the Feast of the Passover, so does our Thanksgiving illumine and glorify the Feast of Ingathering, thus making one of the old and the new, and demonstrating the essential unity of the purposes of God throughout all generations.” But the ancient Feast of Ingathering had another and far greater meaning,—it pointed forward to the ingathering of the hosts of God in the coming harvest, “the end of the world,” when the sheaves shall be the children of God, and the reapers the angels. Matt. 13:39; Rev. 14:14–16. The national Thanksgiving day of America is purely of human appointment, and mere human appointment is hardly sufficient to connect a nation with God, or make it successor to his favor. But it is the second paragraph to which we wish especially to call attention. Easter transfigures the Passover! “Thanksgiving illumines and glorifies the Feast of Ingathering! Both the Passover and the Feast of Ingathering were of divine appointment, commanded of God, and full of meaning to the children of faith. “Easter” is a word which comes from “Eostre,” the Saxon goddess of spring. Men have attempted through human ordinances solely to fasten it upon the anniversary of the resurrection of our Lord, just as they have attempted to make the heathen Sunday do weekly service for the same event. Both Easter and Sunday as religious days are pagan in origin, and for the observance of either or both there is not one single precept of Holy Writ. It is well to give thanks to God even on one day in the year; but the true Christian will do it on all days. But the appointment of a day of thanksgiving by civil authority makes it the merest farce; and the way the day is kept by the majority demonstrates this: it is a day of sports, pleasure, gambling, and gluttony. The true memorial to the world of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a yearly day of pagan origin, but the life power of our Lord manifest in the godly life of his followers every day. The true thanksgiving of the Christian is kept the year round, and is manifest in grateful benevolence to the poor and needy. The elevation of merely human institutions above the explicit appointments of God have ever been a sign of apostasy, and the Lord sometime will well inquire, “Who hath required this at your hands?” On the other hand, he gives us this test of our gratitude and affection for him: “If ye love me, keep my commandments;” “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.”