SABBATH REFORM AND SUNDAY LAWS.
By A. H. Lewis
I HAVE carefully watched the movements of the “New York Sabbath Committee,” as the representative organization in the Sunday-law interest, and beg leave to present one or two results of these observations. (a.) The plan of procedure is faulty. (b.) The premises are false. (c.) The verdict of history condemns “Sunday laws.” (d.) The Word of God condemns them as being dishonorable toward the Lord of the Sabbath. (a.) All civil legislation which places the human enactment more prominently before the mind than it does the divine law, drags the question down to the human level, strips it of its sacredness, and takes away the power of God’s authority. The less cannot regulate the greater. The inferior can never take precedence of the superior, without bringing disaster. The present Sunday-law movement proceeds upon the plea that the State has a right to regulate the observance of the Sabbath. It then assumes that Sunday is the Sabbath, with little or no appeal to God’s Word; and so leaves only the civil authority as the prominent standard. This is more especially true since all are forced to admit that an appeal to the Bible would end in defeat. Thus men see only a requirement of the State, and not a duty to God, and the true Sabbath idea is lost. (b.) The premises are false in point of fact and in point of logic. The basic idea assumes that the Bible teaches the sacredness of the Sunday, in place of the Sabbath. The next step makes the Sunday a separate institution, a sort of compromise between God’s Sabbath and no Sabbath, the “Anglo-American Sabbath” of Dr. Schaff. Next comes the first idea carried on by making the Sabbath law of the Decalogue the basis on which to build a civil law enforcing observance to the Sunday. In support of the claim that the premise is false in point of fact, it need only be said that the first day of the week is mentioned in the Word of God only eight times; six of these being in connection with the announcement of the resurrection. The book of Acts contains but a single reference to the first day, and the first letter to the Corinthians, one. Neither of these refer to the day as commemorative, sacred, or sabbatic. Nor is there any trace of any discussion or practice relative to the change of the Sabbath, in all the New Testament history. The few inferences which have been sought from these passages are of modern date, and devoid of any logical connection with the case. (c.) The verdict of history is pointed and clear. Cessation from labor on Sunday began with the Pagan legislation of Constantine, March 7, A. D. 321. During the same years the Papacy was born, church and state were united; and by the close of the fifth century the Sabbath was driven out of the body of the church by force of civil law, and the Sunday, as the leading weekly festival of the church, brought in. A long train of pall-covered centuries follow, during which the church has no Sabbath, and the Sunday no ground of support, aside from human legislation. Since the Reformation, the Continental Church of Europe has had, in some places, a somewhat higher type of the church Sunday; but it has borne no better fruitage than a careless no-Sabbathism, and a cold, canting infidelity. Puritanism took higher ground, and taught the binding force of the Sabbath law, and the application of it to the Sunday. A complete trial of this theory in the American Church has revealed its unsoundness. All outward circumstances were in its favor. A vigorous theology and the strictest of civil laws conspired to support it. These civil enactments rode on the topmost wave of public opinion, and were rigidly enforced. The “stocks,” the “whipping post,” the “cage on Boston Common,” the “prison-cell,” and the never-relenting “fine,” were all familiar to those who dared transgress the Sunday laws of former days. Years have brought more light, and the “Puritan Sunday” is dead and being buried by a defiant no-Sabbathism, born of its own inconsistencies. Meanwhile, Europe is pouring a more turbid tide of sensual no-Sabbathism upon our shores; and we are sweeping away from God into corruption, ritualism, infidelity. We are repeating what all history has shown, that a Sabbathless people soon become a Godless people. To stem all this tide, the advocates of Sunday law offer the chaff-like opposition of civil enactments, which have no support in the Word of God, nor place in the religious convictions of the people. It is puerile, indeed, thus to oppose with a lance of straw the keen point which the history of the past presents to the breast of the present. (d.) Sunday law teaches that the seventh day, which God declares to be sacred, is not sacred. It presents the Sunday as sacred, in place of the Sabbath, on the false grounds already noticed. Sunday laws thus dishonor that which God has commanded men to honor, and legalizes disobedience under the false plea of obedience. The pure sacrifice is thus taken from the altar, and one full of blemishes, and unsanctified, put in its stead. All this God’s word condemns. Sunday laws, as an element of political power, may gain a temporary success; as an element of reform, they must fail. They touch neither the temperance nor the Sabbath question at the fountain-head. If they check the current of the stream, it is only to turn it into wider channels. It is like the folly of the ignorant charlatan who bandages a severed artery below the wound. The whole effort is unworthy men who have undertaken it, and the cause it wrongly seeks to aid. It is the last sad shift of inconsistency doubling on itself. When the Observer pleads for Sunday law in one breath, and scolds and threatens the Romanists who treat Sunday as Sunday, in the next, it only betrays an irritableness which is born of conscious weakness. Do not misapprehend me. I am opposed, sternly, to all intemperance and rioting, always and everywhere. I deprecate no-Sabbathism as the sin of sins; but I protest, in the name of truth, against those false positions which only hinder the cause of true reform. If the Bible be true, “the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God;” and there can be no real Sabbath reform in connection with any other day. The choice is between God’s Sabbath and no Sabbath. Concerning the final issue there can be no doubt. God will not forsake his law; and truth can afford to wait, protesting by the lips of the few, yet steadily victorious in the power of God. God’s children are listening in every place to “hear the slogan,” while the forces gather for the conflict. The above statements are made briefly, for want of space; but the writer holds himself responsible for each of them, whether historic or exegetical.—A. H. Lewis in N. Y. Independent.