The Sabbath and the Sunday
By Editor
A RECENT issue of the Church Standard, the leading organ of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, contained a lengthy editorial on “The Lord’s Day,” by which it meant Sunday. The opening statement of this editorial is as follows:— The Sunday question, as it is called, is becoming every day a more and more serious question; and the question is fast assuming this form: Whether there is any longer to be a Christian Sunday in this country. . . . It is an admitted fact that not one half of the adult people in any city of this country attends public worship of any kind on the Lord’s day. The Standard regards what it is pleased to designate as “the Puritan sabbath,” by which it means the strict observance of Sunday, as an “utterly unscriptural conception of the Lord’s day,” and states the attitude of the church toward it in these words:— It has never been sanctioned by any authoritative utterance of the Church of England or of any single branch of the Anglican Communion. In this matter Episcopalians have been strangely situated. While their own church has left them for the most part without authoritative instruction on this matter, they have been controlled by the prevalent sentiment of Puritanism, and the continual recitation of the fourth commandment in divine service has created and maintained an impression that the Lord’s day is the sabbath mentioned in that law.4 The Standard then proceeds to give a brief summary of “the whole history and doctrine of that matter,” as follows:— The Hebrew sabbath, though established by divine command, was not otherwise in any sense a religious institution; that (undoubtedly of God’s will and providence) it grew into a religious institution; that the Lord’s day was not, and in apostolic times was never thought to be, identical with the Jewish sabbath in any respect whatever; that it began, as the Jewish sabbath had ended, in a lofty religious purpose, but with no idea of sabbatical obligation; and that, after many ages, it was the signal triumph of the Christian church to gain from the secular power a recognition of the first day of the week as a day on which man and beast should be lawfully entitled to the rest for which the Jewish sabbath provided. There is no need to repeat the abundant proofs of these facts. He who denies them simply affirms his ignorance of history. In further elucidation of its view concerning the relation which Sunday sustains to the Sabbath the Standard says:— We shall search the New Testament in vain for any sign that the Lord’s day was ever regarded by the apostles or the apostolic church as identical with the Jewish sabbath day, or as a continuation of it, or as a substitute for it. Nothing of this kind is discoverable in the New Testament. That is a pregnant fact, and the monstrous error of Puritanism was that its theory of the Lord’s day was a contradiction of that fact. In view of these candid admissions, it is curious enough that the Standard regards the continued observance of the Sabbath of the commandment as an effort to Judaize the church. Of this experience and the establishment of Sunday by legal enactment it says:— By and by the attempt to Judaize the church by teaching that the Mosaic sabbath was still obligatory on Christians was repeatedly condemned by church councils, and at last religious abstinence from labor on that day was positively forbidden. But, when Constantine decreed that public offices should be closed, and ordinary labor suspended on the first day of the week, this was felt to be a triumph of the long-persecuted but now enfranchised Christian church. So, indeed, it was; and thus, by an act of the secular power, prompted by Christian influence, but not at first proclaimed by church authority, the Christian religion gained for the Gentile world that right of man and beast to one day of rest in every week which had first been proclaimed for Israel by the Hebrew law-giver. Through many vicissitudes, and with many deplorable interruptions, that beneficent legislation has practically endured until the present time. The Puritans mistook the groundwork of the whole thing, and they invested what they called the “Christian sabbath” with an austerity never before dreamed of. . . . In spite of all temporary aberrations and extravagances, we are glad that the “Puritan sabbath” is swiftly ceasing to exist. But are we therefore to lose the Lord’s day as Catholic Christendom knew it for fifteen hundred years? or are we to part with its splendid gain for the Gentile world of a weekly day of rest for man and beast? Now may God forbid that criminal folly! To permit it would be to sacrifice one of the greatest gains of Christian civilization; and, apart from all strictly religious sentiment, we hold that the civil state will strike at one essential condition of its own permanent well-being if it does not guard the precious heritage of a weekly day of rest on which no work shall be lawful except that which is demanded by necessity or mercy. The Standard then quotes the canon of the church relating to the proper observance of Sunday, and says that “it ought to be expounded and explained so that our people may understand at least the elements of Christian obligation on this subject.” Here is the canon:— All persons within this church shall celebrate and keep the Lord’s day, commonly called Sunday, by regular participation in the public worship of the church, by hearing the Word of God read and taught, and by other acts of devotion and works of charity, using all godly and sober conversation. As preliminary to any comment which we may make upon this editorial, we call attention to the fact that at the head of the editorial column is printed the “platform” which “the Church Standard accepts and maintains,” the first paragraph of which reads as follows:— The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as “containing all things necessary to salvation,” and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith. In view of this plank in its “platform,” this editorial by the leading paper of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America is certainly a remarkable one. It freely admits that the fourth commandment of the decalogue does not apply to Sunday keeping, and seems to regret that “the continual recitation of the fourth commandment in divine service has created and maintained an impression that the Lord’s day is the Sabbath mentioned in that law.” It further declares that the Lord’s day, by which it always means Sunday, is neither identical with, nor a continuation of, nor a substitute for, the original Sabbath of the commandment. In the face of these admissions and in open defiance of the first plank in its “platform,” the Standard then proceeds without an apology of any kind to set forth the only basis of authority for the observance of the Lord’s day, or Sunday,—the decrees of the church and the enactments of civil government. It does not shrink from the historical truth, but acknowledges that church councils condemned the teaching of the continued obligation to observe the Sabbath of the commandment, ment, and finally positively forbade “religious abstinence from labor on that day.” It regards Constantine’s law forbidding certain kinds of work “on the venerable day of the sun” as “a triumph of the long-persecuted but now enfranchised Christian church,” and frankly states that it was “by an act of the secular power, prompted by Christian influence, but not at first proclaimed by church authority,” that another day, not mentioned in the commandment, was established as the legal day of rest for the world. Having traced the “triumph” of the church in substituting by the aid of the civil power another day in the place of the Sabbath of the commandment, the Standard then calls upon God, whose Sabbath has been set aside, to forbid the “criminal folly” of permitting the false sabbath to be disregarded, and urges it as the duty of the state to pass such laws as shall “guard the precious heritage of a weekly day of rest.” It then quotes the law of the church concerning the proper observance of Sunday. It seems as if the simple reading of this editorial would be sufficient to convince any candid seeker after the truth concerning the Sabbath question that the Sunday institution is wholly of human origin, and that the substitution of Sunday for the Sabbath of the Lord was accomplished by an apostate church allied with pagan government. Such is the fact, and while the Church Standard does not admit this in just these terms, yet when its admissions are read in the light of the history of the first six centuries, the conclusion is inevitable. The Standard and the church which it represents ought to understand the reason for the present decadence of Sunday. The church itself has undermined the confidence of the people in the Bible as the book of God and as having authority over the conscience, and the inevitable result is a lack of confidence in any kind of religious obligation. When, therefore, the church admits that the authority for Sunday observance is found in church decrees and civil enactments, it ought not to be surprised that the people grow more and more inclined to use Sunday purely as a holiday rather than as a holy day. As the civil power established the day by its authority “prompted by Christian influence,” so the civil power is called upon to preserve the day by its authority. And it will doubtless attempt this in consequence of the pressure brought to bear upon it by an apostate church. Thus the test of loyalty to God and his commandment, or of loyalty to another power, will be brought to every person. We must continue to say with the apostles of old, “We ought to obey God rather than men.”