An English Catholic Challenge by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 11, 1909

An English Catholic Challenge

By W. A. S.

THE Catholic publishers, Burns and Oates, of London, publish a “Library of Christian Doctrine” for the Brotherhood of St. Vincent of Paul, an organization for mission work among Protestants. One tract of this series is entitled, “Why Don’t You Keep Holy the Sabbath Day? A question for all Bible Christians.” The following extracts (italics theirs) show that the Roman Catholic Church in England is as free to challenge the inconsistency of Protestants in the matter of Sunday observance as is the church in this country. The Roman Church is everywhere using the Sunday institution as the sign, or mark, of the supremacy of the papal church over the Word of God.

But Sunday is not the Sabbath day. Sunday is the first day of the week; the Sabbath day was the seventh day of the week. Almighty God did not give a commandment that men should keep holy one day in seven; but he named his own day, and said distinctly, “Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day;” and he assigned a reason for choosing this day rather than any other—a reason which belongs only to the seventh day of the week, and can not be applied to the rest.—Page 3.

You are a Protestant, and you profess to go by the Bible, and the Bible only; and yet in so important a matter as the observance of one day in seven as a holy day, you go against the plain letter of the Bible, and put another day in the place of that day which the Bible has commanded. The command to keep holy the seventh day is one of the ten commandments; you believe that the other nine are still binding; who gave you authority to tamper with the fourth? If you are consistent with your own principles, if you really follow the Bible, and the Bible only, you ought to be able to produce some portion of the New Testament in which this fourth commandment is expressly altered, or at least from which you may confidently infer that it was the will of God that Christians should make that change in its observance which you have made.—Page 3.

We blame you, not for making Sunday your weekly holy day instead of Saturday, but for rejecting tradition, which is the only safe and clear rule by which this observance can be justified. In outward act we do the same as yourselves in this matter; we, too, no longer observe the Jewish Sabbath, but Sunday in its stead; but then there is this important difference between us, that we do not pretend, as you do, to derive our authority for so doing from a book, but we derive it from a living teacher, and that teacher is the church.—Page 8.

Both you and we do, in fact, follow tradition in this matter; but we follow it, believing it to be a part of God’s word, and the church to be its divinely appointed guardian and interpreter: you follow it, denouncing it all the time as a fallible and treacherous guide, which often “makes the commandment of God of none effect.”—Page 8.

W. A. S.