Sunday the Original Sabbath.
Dear Bro. Smith: The following argument for the institution of Sunday, I copy from a letter just received from a Methodist minister. The ground he takes is somewhat different from anything I recollect of ever having seen. Will you please notice it through the Review, as it may help the minds of some. “1. Have you any chronology of the Sabbath being kept regularly before the children of Israel were brought out of Egypt? The Sabbath was instituted, to be sure, at the end of creation, on the seventh day. Again, you know that the Jews kept different time after they left Egypt from anybody else. They left Egypt in the month of March, fourteenth day, and the Lord told Moses to keep that as the beginning of the year. In Deut. v, it is said, And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God brought thee out thence, &c., therefore he commanded thee to keep the Sabbath-day. If the fourteenth day in which they left Egypt began new time, six days of the new time for work, would bring the next Sabbath on the twenty-first, and so on.” “Now, 2. Can you convince me that Saturday in this new year of Jehovah’s time fell on the original seventh or sixth? I think that it was the first day of old time. If so, it was a Jewish Sabbath, to be done away with all the rest of the Jewish polity; and the resurrection by which we are delivered from the bondage of death, fell on Sunday, the original Sabbath restored to the whole world according to the original design.” REMARKS.—No better evidence that the Sabbath was regularly kept from creation onward, could be required, than the fact, which the writer above quoted seems ready to grant, that the Sabbath was instituted at the end of the creation week. If the Sabbath was then instituted, it was designed of course to be kept from that time onward. And if God thus designed it to be kept, of course his people during those ages regularly kept it. The idea that the Sabbath was then instituted, but yet was not designed to be kept till 2500 years afterwards, when the children of Israel came out of Egypt, looks to us like too great an absurdity to be entertained by any reasonable man. The question is thus settled till the time of the exode. Let us now look at the change which there took place. This writer says that “the Jews kept different time after they left Egypt from anybody else;” and among the Methodists it is getting to be a prevailing view, or, at least, claim, that the change which then took place involved a change of the Sabbath. Let us then carefully and candidly inquire what change did here take place, and how much it involved. It is all recorded in the first two verses of Ex. xii: “And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months, it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Here is the whole record. But is there anything said about the Sabbath? Not a word. Anything about a change in the numbering of the days of the week? Not a word. It only directs that a certain month should be to them the beginning of the year. And all who have recently sprung up to advocate a change of Sabbath at this point, have committed the singular oversight of not showing how a change in the commencement of the year, would affect the numbering of the days of the week, or a change of the Sabbath. This they must do, if they would save their theory from that contempt, to which, without this addition, it is certainly entitled. To illustrate this point, let us suppose that by universal consent the beginning of the year as now computed should be changed from Jan. 1, to March 1; that March should be the first month of the year instead of January. Would this affect the week? the numbering of the days of the week? or any institution celebrated upon any particular day of the week? Any one can see that it would not. Neither would a similar change in the days of the Israelites.