THOUGHTS ABOUT LABORING ON SUNDAY.
By Roswell F. Cottrell
It is the first-day of the week. Yesterday we enjoyed a good meeting with the Lockport church at Sr. Paine’s, near Gasport, where we unexpectedly met with three sisters from Battle Creek. Have been reading the last Review this morning and digesting pretty thoroughly the editorial; “When does it apply?” which meets my hearty approval. Now, of course, I am at the secretary writing. But I am getting weary from mental labor, and want a “brain tonic.” I see from my window some thrifty, growing potatoes, and the weeds are getting a good start too. I shall gain two objects by going out and hoeing potatoes awhile; a benefit to myself and a benefit to the growing crop. But it is the first-day of the week; and how will it affect my good neighbors to see me at labor, as they pass, some of them on their way to church, others to seek their various pleasures? Pleasure hunters need take no encouragement from us in their unsabbathical pursuits; for they know that on the seventh-day we neither labor nor seek worldly pleasures. But what can I say to my religious friends and neighbors? Well, it occurs to me that when they argue for the change of the day of the Sabbath, they say that the particular day is not essential; if any one day of the seven is kept as a Sabbath to the Lord, it is perfectly acceptable to God. I kept the Sabbath yesterday the seventh-day of the week. Certainly, if any one day in seven is acceptable with God, the day that he has named in the commandment, and bid us remember and keep holy, is acceptable with him. And what is acceptable with God, ought to be with my religious neighbors; especially as their platform gives me the liberty to choose any day I please. I choose the day that God has chosen, rested upon, blest, and sanctified. It answers to their rule, for it is truly one day in seven. And more than this, it is the particular day of the seven upon which God rested and which he blessed and sanctified and commanded us to keep. Will my liberal neighbors persecute me for doing what their creed allows me to do? Of course not. Will they ever do it? Will they ever try to compel me to keep the particular day which they choose to call the Sabbath? In the time of trouble right before us it will be seen. I hope some of them will be converted to the true Sabbath before that. Those that are not will then be left to the full control of Satan, and they will engage in a final war of extermination against those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. My example may awaken some to choose the right way of the Lord, and be the means of their salvation from that great “hour of temptation.” My conclusion then is, that what my hands find to do to day, I will do it with my might, carefully avoiding every annoyance to my neighbors.