SABBATH REFORM by Editor

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 30, 1867

SABBATH REFORM.

By Editor

The following article by Eld. A. H. Lewis, Seventh-day Baptist, was written for the N. Y. Independent. The Editor of that paper rejected it, saying, “We cannot afford space for the discussion which your article proposes and invites.” We copy from The Sabbath Recorder, of April 18, 1867. The crisis of which Bro. L. speaks, we think, is nearer than he intimates.

To the Editor of the Independent:

Your correspondent, Rev. John P. Gulliver, in the Independent of March 28th, says, “Nothing is settled which is not settled right.” It is a great truth. We have proven it sadly in our late national struggle—perhaps I should rather say, are proving it true in our unfinished struggle. Despite this experience, we are in danger of making the same error in our efforts at Sabbath Reform. This question is becoming every day more prominent. Men see how we are running into no-Sabbathism, and are startled. They tremble, as the barriers which they have deemed impregnable go down before free thinking, skepticism, and growing immorality. They say, “It is because the Sabbath is desecrated; we must build it up—must sustain it.” The civil arm is therefore sought to sustain the Sunday. This is seeking to do the right thing in the wrong way. Sunday is not the Sabbath! I weigh my words carefully; I speak soberly. Every careful reader of the Bible knows that Mr. Bushnell is right when he says that Baptists, with little scruple, “accept the Lord’s day, even against a specific command of the Decalogue, and let the ancient Sabbath go, when it is only by the faintest, most equivocal, or evanescent indications, they can make out a shadow of authority for the change.” (Christian Nurture, page 157.) Every careful student of Church History knows, that the Sunday was never deemed a Sabbath, by virtue of the fourth commandment, until the time of the Puritans. It came into the Church, (in common with Wednesday and Friday,) as a weekly festival. The first authentic reference to its observance is found in the writings of Justin Martyr, about the middle of the second century. The earliest and main reasons given for its observance were vague and fanciful, not even claiming to be scriptural. Its first character as a rest-day came from the civil enactment of Constantine the Great, A. D. 321. This law recognized it only as the “venerable day of the sun,” a heathen festival. The law was made while Constantine was yet a heathen.

Puritanism rejected the dogma of Church authority, and, with higher desires after holiness, recognized the validity of God’s law. But it was still weak on this question. It claimed the right to apply the law to a day not named in the law. Little effort was made to prove this position. It was rather assumed.

The trial of Puritanism in America has fully developed this weakness. With everything in its favor, the “Puritan Sabbath” has steadily lost ground. Its unwarranted rigidity could not give real strength. To-day we see society going to pieces on this question and seek to save it by binding the raft together with the cords of legal enactment. It will not do. The structure is inherently weak, because wrong. Any temporary success which may be gained will not be a settlement of the question.

So far as these efforts promote the cause of temperance and good order, I heartily endorse them. But the success must be short-lived. It seems to be not so much the cause of temperance, as of the so-called Sabbath, which the law seeks to honor. If the Excise Law can not be enforced on all days, I grant it is better to enforce it on one day in each week. But let it be done under no false pretense. God has made only one day the Sabbath. “The seventh-day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.” God has never left the Christian church without those who have obeyed this law in full. There is a chain of Sabbath-keepers from the time of Christ to the present hour. He will not leave his day unvindicated in the future. All the efforts of the present will only drive us nearer the real point at issue. As the compromises, and opposition, and calumny of the early days of the “anti-slavery reform” drove us steadily toward the bloody settlement from which we are emerging, so all efforts to legalize and uphold the Sunday, will drive us nearer to the true Sabbath. Years may pass before the masses will heed the question. The crisis may seem to be distant, but it will come. The American church must choose—no-lawism, no-Sabbathism, Churchism, Ritualism, and Infidelity, or the truth that law is supreme, and that God’s Sabbath given as our great moral safeguard and hope, is binding, through all time, on all peoples.