A Specious Argument by S. B. H.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 21, 1911

A Specious Argument

By S. B. H.

THE Defender of June-July published an editorial on “Physiological Reasons for the Weekly Rest Day,” and associated with the article Dr. Hegley’s chart, in which it is assumed that Sunday rest is essential to mankind for the preservation of physical health. This is one of the excuses put forward for the enactment of civil laws compelling the observance of Sunday. It is a fact supported by available evidence that for the most part this “discovery” has been made by some of the clergy favoring compulsory Sunday observance. But the claim that physicians and scientists generally indorse this position is not sustained by the record. In the light of history, the position of the Defender on the question amounts to nothing more nor less than assumption. It goes without saying that the number of people in this world who have kept Sunday regularly as a day of rest, is comparatively small. The weekly rest day is mostly confined to those lands where the people profess Christianity. In heathen lands weekly rest is not observed, and it never has been known among the heathen nations of past times; and yet it is of record that in point of physical perfection, the heathen compare favorably with the people of so-called Christian nations.

A bit of more recent history from the pen of Bishop Andrews, of the Methodist Church, who has visited China, will be of interest:—

“In China they have no septennial division of time, no weekly rest day, but merely annual festivals. They work right along all the time, with no day of rest as such; yet they live to a very advanced age. This fact has led one of the most careful thinkers who has ever been sent as a missionary to China, to raise the serious question whether the great purpose of the Sabbath is not for worship and communion with the other world.”

We are not contending that Sabbath observance does not bring physical as well as spiritual benefit, but we do maintain that to make physiological reasons a basis for compulsory Sunday observance is unwarranted. The Bible tells us of such men as Goliath of Gath, Og king of Bashan, and “the giants, the sons of Anak,” concerning whom the ten spies reported, We were in their eyes as grasshoppers. The ancient Greeks furnished some of the most noted men in point of physical perfection, and yet they had no weekly rest day. Neither did the conquering armies of Rome follow the practise of observing a weekly day of rest.

To refer to the Defender again, we find in that issue an article by Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, on the subject of Sunday play, in which he says, among other things:—

“We are indeed becoming a child nation like Spain, with half of its time devoted to saints’ days and holidays. If most of our people were not so much on the street and in places of amusement in their leisure hours, and had the time to read something of history, they would recognize an alarming likeness between our present situation and those days before the fall of the Roman empire, when the common cry of the people was ‘bread and games.’ To an unprecedented degree, Americans are busy with money-making by day and pleasure-making by night; and if the pleasures were not in themselves degrading, they would degrade by their very excess.”

It seems to us that Mr. Crafts in this language points out the real difficulty with the mass of humanity to-day. As he puts it, dissipation threatens the people. Continuous pleasure-making at night, the divinely ordained time for physical rest, is the thing to be deprecated. And if we are to argue in behalf of rest periods from the effects of dissipation carried on at night, when we should be resting physically, it would require more than one weekly rest day sufficiently to offset the trouble.

It should be remembered in passing that the eight-hour working-day, the half-holiday on Saturday, and the early closing of stores, are coming to be generally observed; and, taken in connection with Dr. Crafts’ “saints’ days and holidays,” it would seem superfluous to compel the people by civil law to rest on Sunday.

But the motive behind compulsory Sunday observance by civil law is designed to conserve religious rather than physiological ends, Dr. Crafts himself being the judge; and we are safe in concluding that the argument put forth in behalf of “Physiological Reasons for the Weekly Rest Day” by the Sunday-law advocates is a very specious one, and certainly lacks the necessary element of logic.

S. B. H.