The Last Argument by M. W. H.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 17, 1870

The Last Argument.

By M. W. H.

A NEW argument, and the last, it might well be presumed, I thought as I heard one who was guiding a Bible class remark upon John 20: 19, “Here was when and how the Sabbath was changed. ‘The same day at evening, being the first day of the week.’ Heretofore the Jewish day had begun and ended at sunset; the evening and the morning being the day; but here the succeeding evening was added to the past day, thereby carrying the first Christian Sabbath up to midnight, making the day ever after begin and end at midnight.”

I could but wonder from whence came such erudite knowledge. Certainly it was far-fetched, possibly, dearly bought. Such misrepresentations may meet the approval of fellow-mortals as deeply prejudiced as themselves, but when the hidden things of dishonesty shall be revealed, such perversions of the sacred word must appear in their true light.

Doubtless that rendering of the verse is the “repealing clause” of the fourth commandment, since it is correctly argued that a law once made, is binding until it is repealed, or otherwise expires by limitation. Very recently I heard this ground distinctly taken by a preacher, who, even quoting at length the first, second, and third commandments, and asking at each in turn, defiantly, “Where is the repealing clause?” Then by a strange consistency (for in the morning sermon he had averred that the Lord’s supper was observed as a remembrance of our Lord’s death; and the Christian Sabbath as commemorative of the resurrection,) he passed silently over the fourth, quoting again the fifth and sixth, asking as before, for the “repealing clause,” then closed with a sweeping assertion “that thus with the rest, no repealing clause could be found; hence the whole was still in force.” M. W. H.