A FICTITIOUS SABBATH by A Whilom Devotee

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 21, 1881

A FICTITIOUS SABBATH.

By A Whilom Devotee

BY A WHILOM DEVOTEE.

A GREAT deal of manufactured sanctity obtains among religious people. Fiction is not confined to novel-writing artists, for if we critically examine the beliefs and vague sort of faiths which constitute the phenomena of religion as a whole, we shall find as wild and gratuitous romances as in the works of the Troubadours or the Arabian Tales. It makes but little difference about the reality or truth of an object—it may be as commonplace or void as any secular occurrence—if men through any influence come to think it sacred, or hallowed, they begin to exercise a determined and ferocious guardianship, which makes it dangerous to the happiness and, in some countries, to the life of him who would treat it lightly. A dog, trained to watch, will show his teeth for a stone as quickly as for a diamond. In this fact, philosophers may perceive the cause of religious persecutions. The human mind, matured on the bias, flies back in the face of the one who attempts to bend it straight.

Innovations are peculiarly offensive to so conservative a thing as religion. There is no doubt that men are more punctilious and less discriminating than Christ. It is not the tithe and the tunic border, said he, but the great principles of duty and love.

Among the many things by which men have been attracted from nobler and grander devotions is the unnatural and persevering endeavor to attach holiness to Sunday.

This disposition was specially manifested by the early settlers of New England. What men could feel neither by nature nor change of heart was superinduced upon them by careful and ingenious education, and when that failed they had resort to the "cat," the "stocks," or confiscation. Sunday was made sacred in every injunction of the school-master, the magistrate, and the priest. It was a manufactured sacredness from its very beginning. What is lacked in the nature of things must be made up, if essential, by artificial means. It never had the seal of sanctity from God; it is out of reason to rest on the day the week begins just as much as it is to go to sleep in the morning; and as no example of holding the day sacred can be found in the lives of the great exemplars, it is no wonder that, in these days, when priesteraft has lost its fictitious authority—an authority whose voice used to make trespassers shake with dread—and religious education has been diluted by wide variety, Sunday has lost its former solemnity and strictness.

Now and then some puritan Van Winkle rises, as if from his twenty years' sleep, and delivers his Philippic on the changed and deteriorated customs of the times with regard to keeping the "Sabbath," and with all the deep, sepulchral gravity of an anchorite of the twelfth century, repeats the fourth commandment, not seeming to know how little that part of the decalogue has to do with the first day of the week. One could as well enjoin upon us the Friday of Mahomet by such an authority.

Men who profess to common sense should not stultify themselves by reference to the fourth commandment when enjoining Sunday as a day of rest. Its sanctity is wholly fictitious, and a poor fiction at that. Like the worship which finds expression on that day, it is only a social institution which men of the world favor as much as deacons of the churches, or the brilliant corteges of fashion that throng the velvet and tessellated aisles. Christianity, if it is such as it is called, though I claim it to be only a name for an entirely different thing, was never so popular as to-day. This system of socialism is a greater machine than politics. It means nirvana to the individual, and Diana to the institution. It is simply ostracism to oppose it. It is all world, all success, the tout monde of literature and influence and society. Sunday is one of its main pillars. In that universally acknowledged festival of the Papacy meet on terms of agreement, the Roman, the Protestant, and the infidel. It is the religious Fourth of July that commemorates the day when the arch-imposter declared his independence of the ten commandments. How embarrassing it must be to those who feign would be humble Christians indeed, and Protestants, to repudiate the Pope's argument for the observance of Sunday, which is simply his authority, and laboriously shift his ground to false and specious applications of the fourth commandment. This necessity must be as painful to his conscience as it is trying to his intellect. But, as for me, I would not so misuse my reason for fear of deranging it and creating a state of disagreeable hostility between my heart and my mind. Fiction may do for amusement, but it is very demoralizing as an element of faith. This is a peculiar age of the world when Christian professors themselves are preached to as they preach to the unconverted, to change from a course of plain error to the acceptance of truth, to quit following cunningly devised fables, and step into the path of law and reality. Ministers preach love to Christ, and persistently refuse to submit to his ordinance of baptism, and also, while claiming to be obedient to God, deliberately violate his solemn commandment, and, in addition to that, employ it vainly and artfully in the support of something which it in no wise concerns.

Where then, I ask, is the sincerity of religion? Has it not descended to the purest utilitarianism, a purpose which originates in personal selfishness, and which takes advantage of a part of the gospel to render more highly practical the part that is opposed to it? So the whiteness of the artist's lead is used to soften and tone down the darkness of the otherwise unpleasing background. Some religion makes much business thrive.