Saving Sunday by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Apr 28, 1904

Saving Sunday

By L. A. S.

THE question of how to save Sunday has long troubled Protestants who believe that day to be the Christian sabbath; and as time goes on, developments in the church and in the world seem to make it more and more a matter of anxious concern. This was the theme of several speakers at a recent Sunday service in Mendelssohn Hall, New York City. One of these, the Rev. W. R. Huntington, spoke of the “growing disregard of the Sabbath,” and connected it with the increasing lawlessness of the times. The question now is how we shall save the institution, rather than how we shall observe the day, he said. “There are two bonds holding together the Christians of the world—the Holy Bible and the Sabbath day. If one wants to preserve and keep these bonds, he must keep the Sabbath as a reminder of the Almighty.”

This last statement touches the root of the difficulty. That Sabbath which is a reminder of the Almighty and is observed as such, is in no danger of being overthrown and lost. God himself is its guardian. The reason of the perishable nature of Sunday is that it rests on a perishable foundation. It rests only on human authority and tradition. When that foundation gives way, the institution must of necessity fall to the ground. Sunday is not a reminder of the Creator, and can not be kept as such. That reminder is the seventh-day Sabbath, which though opposed by popular custom in both the church and the world, is steadily making progress and gaining adherents in every land to-day.

It is interesting to note the reply called forth from a Catholic priest by this Protestant agitation over the question of preserving Sunday. The day following the report of this discussion, “Father” Tiernan, of Camden, N. Y., sent to the Sun, in reply, this statement of the Roman Catholic position regarding the character of Sunday and the authority on which it rests as a religious day:—

The Lord’s day, or Sunday, is not the Sabbath of the Bible, nor has it been made by the principle of private judgment, nor by the Bible; for it is the holy mass, the supreme act of worship, with the general law of the Catholic Church for ages binding on the Lord’s day, that has made the holy observance of the day in Christendom.

The consequences which these reverend gentlemen strive to remedy were initiated by the ancestral founders of the denominations to which they belong. Neither the Rev. W. R. Huntington nor the Bible can ever repair the floodgates thus opened to unsacrificial observance of the Lord’s day, the day of nearly twenty centuries.

Neither men nor the Bible, it is true, can furnish any good foundation for the popular Protestant position regarding Sunday. The Word of God declares the seventh day to be the Sabbath; the word of the papacy sets up the first day of the week in place of the seventh. It is for Protestants to decide whether the Lord, or whether Baal, is God. There is nothing to be gained by longer halting between two opinions.

It is true that the Bible and the Sabbath are two bonds holding together the Christians of the world, but this is true of the Bible received by faith, and not through the higher criticism, or the “new thought;” and it is true of the Sabbath of the Bible, and not of Sunday. The Sunday binds Christians only to Rome.

L. A. S.