Making a New Sabbath by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 9, 1910

Making a New Sabbath

By C. M. S.

THERE are certain organizations in the United States that are setting for themselves a gigantic task,—the creation of a sabbath adequate to the needs of the present day. The Catholic Church and certain branches of the professed Protestant church have agreed together to work for the exaltation of Sunday, and to bring that about by legislation.

But the Catholic Church repudiates the idea of a sabbath that shall partake in any sense of the nature of what it terms the Judaic Sabbath. The strictness of the regulations of the divine Sabbath are not to her liking. Said the Catholic Lay Congress at Baltimore, on Nov. 12, 1889:—

“We should seek an alliance with non-Catholics for proper Sunday observance. Without going over to the Judaic Sabbath, we can bring the masses over to the moderation of the Christian Sunday.”

Various Catholic priests have declared that it is not their purpose to put strict Sabbath-keeping into their Sunday observance. They propose to have a day of rest which shall be in harmony with their own desires and purposes. Members of that church who attend mass on Sunday morning may do about as they please for the remainder of the day, and there are no questions asked. A Catholic saloon-keeper, even, is not required by his church to close up his business on Sunday. A Catholic section-hand may work every Sunday through the year, and still be a good Catholic, provided he attends mass once during the year. Of course, as that church established that sabbath, it is but logical that she should determine the manner of its observance.

But when Protestants, who repudiate the idea that they are observing a man-made institution, and claim that the day they observe is divinely appointed, take a position similar to the Catholic Church in reference to the manner of observing the day, their position is a very inconsistent one. Having had nothing to do with the establishment of that rest-day institution, it is certainly not for them to say how the day shall be observed. But this is being done in more than one pulpit. In a sermon at Providence, R. I., on May 22, Rev. George Kent set the matter before his congregation in this manner:—

“I do not hesitate to tell you men whose outings will be almost limited to these few coming summer Sundays, that you have all the absolution I can give you from attendance at church service. I’m not afraid that you or your religion will be lost. The church has a better and vastly harder business than condemning a man’s Sunday sport.

“This modern man must have a sabbath made for him radically different from the type adapted to the tropic Oriental world of long ago. And the church has no braver or harder task than to make such a sabbath for man,—for the man that is in our civilized world today. Instead of opposing, it must lead him in a manly, wholesome use of Sunday out-of-doors. . . .

“To make a sabbath for man, with all the needed and blessed ends it can be made to serve, amid all the complex and conflicting conditions it has to harmonize, is indeed a problem to take the wisest, largest, and most patient handling.”

And so the matter of legislating righteousness into mankind, regulating man’s relation to God by civil enactment, enforcing a sabbath by human law, etc., has blossomed out into such a flower as this! We have always taken the position that to attempt to enforce a real religious institution by civil law would result in putting the religious institution on a level with human institutions; for by that process they are both made to appear to be standing upon the same foundation—human law. It has had, and is having, that result. They have come to look upon the Sabbath institution as something which they can manipulate according to their own ideas. And if they can do that, they can abolish the institution, and make one of their own, with requirements of their own, or without requirements. Such a foundation is no foundation at all. But it is the logical outcome of the idea that men have anything whatever to do with the enforcement of a divine requirement. As soon as they lay hold upon it to enforce it, they take it out of God’s hands, so far as its effect upon them is concerned, and all the rest is bound to follow.

C. M. S.