Some Good Testimony

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 13, 1908

Some Good Testimony

THE minds of religious teachers seem to be greatly stirred at the present time over various phases of the Sabbath question. This is shown in the number of articles written, and the number of addresses delivered, upon this subject, as well as in the constant effort to secure an enforced regard for Sunday by legislative enactment.

But there is considerable confusion among the advocates of Sunday observance as to the authority to which appeal may be made in behalf of a first day sabbath. Some writers, however, perceive clearly, and frankly admit, that there is no basis for the Sunday sabbath in the fourth commandment. Paul Moore Strayer, D. D., of Rochester, N. Y., in an article in the Homiletic Review for August, states the case thus:—

The Jewish Sabbath has been succeeded by the Christian Sunday. The Sunday is not the sabbath. The law of Moses designated the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath, and for the reason that Jehovah rested on the seventh day. The Christian observes the first day of the week. The Christian Sunday is a new institution, as baptism is. And, to be strictly literal, the fourth commandment can no more be appealed to as enacting the Christian Sunday than the laws requiring circumcision, the Hebrew’s initiatory rite, can be appealed to as making obligatory the Christian’s initiatory rite of baptism. The fourth commandment is kept to-day only by orthodox Jews, the Seventh-day Adventists, and a few others. . . . The change from the seventh day of the week to the first was, we are justified in saying, the result of divine guidance. It was a gradual change, and has absolutely no authority in the New Testament.

We fully agree with these admissions that there is no authority either in the fourth commandment or in the New Testament for the observance of Sunday as a sabbath, but we can not consent to the claim of “divine guidance” which would lead the church to a practise directly contrary to the divine commandment. God’s providence does not contradict his precepts.

Those who accept the Protestant principle that the revelation made in the Scriptures “is abundantly sufficient for man’s guidance in all questions of faith, practise, and modes of worship, and excludes the necessity and the right of any human inventions,” will, if consistent, observe the seventh-day Sabbath as soon as their attention is called to the lack of Bible testimony in behalf of Sunday. The observance of Sunday as a sabbath is a purely human invention.