Blunders in Sabbath Reform.
By A. H. Lewis
No REFORM starting from a false premise can succeed. The enthusiasm of individuals or peoples may seem to gain something for reform, in spite of radical defects in theories and modes of action. But such success is only temporary, and is sure to be followed by a corresponding reaction in favor of evil. This truth is clearly illustrated in the history of Sabbath reform in the Protestant church. The Puritans have been the chief workers in this department. Their theory is an attempt at compromise between the Sabbath of the Bible and Romish no-Sabbathism. It asserts the perpetuity of the Sabbath law, but denies the central element of time as designated by the law. By a limping logic the mangled law is then applied to the Romish Sunday, and an unscriptural claim made in favor of a pretended “change of day” by a divine authority. This theory had its birth at a time when the spirit of reform was riding at high tide, and the people were ready to accept anything which opposed Romanism. The rigid civil laws which held sway during the reign of Cromwell, gave an outward show of great sanctity to the Sunday; but the restoration of the royal power brought with it a reign of vice and lawlessness, which speedily swept this away. Puritanism was driven to America, and brought the Sunday as one of its chief elements. The civil government of the colonists grew out of their religious system, and “Sunday laws” found a prominent place. Laws were made for a purpose in those days; and men kept Sunday, or paid the penalty of disobedience at the whipping-post, in the stocks, in the prison, or at the office of the collector of fines. But, with everything thus in its favor, the “Puritan Sunday” has steadily lost power, and has become a thing of the past. Rigidity has given way to license, and the American people are drifting rapidly down into no-Sabbathism. As the waters rise, men see the danger, and cry out for Sabbath reform—“the hope of the church, the conservator of freedom.” But the popular effort, thus far, is full of weakness and inconsistency. If there be any representative theory now among “orthodox” people, it is the “Anglo-American” theory of Dr. Schaff and the New York Sabbath Committee—a theory compounded of Puritanism, Rationalism, and assumption, and tending to the no-Sabbathism which it seeks to oppose. In defiance of the verdict of history, it appeals to the civil law rather than the word of God. “The state must preserve the Sabbath,” is its plea. Such a thing is impossible. Men will not—nay, cannot—keep the Sabbath unless they do it as a religious duty toward God. The essence of true Sabbathism is reverence and love for God. A “civil Sabbath” is a mere holiday, with the real elements of the Sabbath eliminated. But a double inconsistency rests upon the popular effort. The church, which claims so much for the Sabbath, is every day trampling it under foot. Every reader of history and the Bible knows that Sunday is not the Sabbath. If men throw away the day mentioned in the Sabbath law, they throw away the law; for “time is the essence of the contract.” If the church discards this, it is foolishly inconsistent to put another day into the law, and claim the sanction of the law for it. If the church may thus do, then must we go back to the doctrine of “church authority,” and Protestantism is a failure. The real issue in Sabbath reform is between law and no law, God and the church. It is the same principle which was involved in our late national struggle; viz., shall the general law-making power be supreme? or shall each man, or organization of men, make laws regardless of what the general power may say? It is the theory of “state rights” applied to the church and God; and the effort on the part of the church to make the “state” take the place of God, is only complicating the case and increasing the difficulty. There is no half-way ground. If the law of the Sabbath was abrogated by Christ, it is folly and sin to seek its restoration. Christ knew what the world needed, and he who claims the world needs a Sabbath, when Christ annulled the Sabbath, contradicts Christ. Again, if Christ abrogated the Sabbath, he did not put Sunday in the place of it. Every careful student of the New Testament, and of the history of the church, knows that Sunday observance had no place in the church until the middle of the second century; that it came in and was established mainly through the influence of the heathenish element, which found a place in the church during the third and fourth centuries; that it never claimed any Sabbatic character, by virtue of the fourth commandment, until the close of the sixteenth century, when Puritanism invented the modern theory as a makeshift. Men know these facts, and hence have little regard for Sunday except in its native character—a holiday. Orthodoxy begins to feel the force of these facts; and, avoiding the decisions of God’s word, clamors for the civil law to uphold the Sunday. It is time that good men ceased to seek for right ends by wrong means—means so radically defective as to insure defeat. The first legitimate question in Sabbath reform is concerning the perpetuity of the Sabbath. If it was only a Jewish institution, there is nothing left to us but a civil holiday for rest, or a wise distribution of labor, which shall supersede the necessity for any special time of rest. But, if “the Sabbath was made for man,” God’s representative in human life, the shield against infidelity and atheism, beginning in Eden and pointing to Eden restored, as Christ and the Bible declare, then the church which tramples upon it, and stigmatizes it as the “Jewish Saturday,” stealing its sacred name to give a false character to Sunday, leads in Sabbath-breaking. Through such a church, Sabbath reform can never come.—A. H. LEWIS, in Independent.