Untitled article by A. O. Tait

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · September 3, 1891

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 6, No. 35

To Make Christians Keep Sunday.

By A. O. Tait

In the American Sabbath for June, Rev. James Brand, D.D., says that the “Christian Sabbath is in peril most of all from the secularization of the Church. There is hardly any subject in the interest of which it is so hard to arouse men or to secure an audience, even among Christians, as on this subject of the Sabbath.” He then follows with an exhortation to the ministers to agitate this question “till the Christian conscience is aroused.”

In another article in the same paper Professor J. L. McCartney, Secretary of the fourth district of the American Sabbath Union, in giving a report of his work in Wheeling, West Virginia, says:

I was told that it was a common thing for Christians to buy fruit on the Lord’s day; that one grocer said they (the church members of a certain congregation) were some of his best customers on the Sabbath; and that the pastor of the congregation had frequently sent for things on the Sabbath.”

He further adds, that “the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Wheeling, had out a flaming placard for an excursion next Sabbath from Pittsburg to Wheeling, at $1.50 for the round trip. Ministers from Pittsburg, and their congregations, pastors and their congregations of neighboring towns, were all invited to the grand rally on that day. It was the boldest and most outrageous desecration of the Sabbath by the Church that I have ever known.”

Mr. Little, of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in a paper read before the Congregational Council of the World, at London, July 20, stated that, “the duty of the Church, more difficult and important than any other, was to be right in its practice. Some of the greatest obstacles to the correct observance of the day were the thoughtless habits of Christian people.”

A minister in Duluth, Minnesota, speaking on the Sunday question recently, said: “But unfortunately the trains are moving, mails are being sent over the land, machinery is in motion, men are working incessantly, and we poor Christians are patronizing their employers.”

Charles A. Blanchard, President of Wheaton (Illinois) College, wrote recently in regard to the perils of Sunday:—

In the second place the teaching of the pulpit has largely failed; the practice of the pew has failed more largely and lamentably. Professing Christians break the Sabbath in their homes; require those whom they employ to break it and share in the profits of Sabbath breaking. So that men of the world look at the method of Church observance and believe that it does not make any difference whether men keep the Sabbath or not. They do not feel afraid to disregard it, because they see persons who profess to be obedient to God, violating it themselves.”

In regard to the means to be used to change the present condition of Sunday work and amusements, he further adds:—

My opinion is that if the Church alone would begin and energetically do what God requires, the current of public thought in regard to the Lord’s day would be changed in six months. If preachers, teachers in theological seminaries, and leading members of churches, continue to print, sell, and read Sunday newspapers, to own stock in, act as managers of, and travel on Sabbath-breaking trains, consent that the mail service of our entire Nation should be reducing to practical heathenism thousands of our fellow-men, if the Church continues in this line, the Sabbath day will not be recovered, and the ruin of those who are destroyed for want of it will lie very largely at the door of the Church.”

It is too bad that “Christians” will persist in acting so; why is it that they won’t keep Sunday any better? But one might more pertinently ask, why is it that so many of them are clamoring for laws to compel everybody to keep Sunday when they do not keep it themselves? Do they realize an inability to keep the day, and so ask the Government to station an army of brass buttoned blue coats about them to compel them to do their duty? And dreading the example of some one whose conscience does not smite him for working, or for attending some place of worldly amusement on Sunday, does this class of Christians ask a law to compel everybody to keep Sunday for fear their weak knees and undeveloped spines cannot sustain them against the Sunday-breaking influences?

Professed Christians should be ashamed of themselves for asking human law to sustain an obligation for which they claim a divine command. If God has commanded men to observe Sunday there is certainly no need of human law upon the subject. If he has not commanded such observance, the sooner it sinks into eternal desuetude the better. If Christians want people to observe the things they believe, let them present to the world the example of a consistent life. There is no influence to be compared with the power of Jesus Christ in a truly consistent Christian. It is to this power, and to this alone, that Christians are to look for success in making mankind better. Let us trust more in God and less in human law. A. O. TAIT.