NO SABBATH | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 18, 1880

NO SABBATH.

IN an essay on the Sabbath, written by a journey-man printer in Scotland, there occurs the following passage. Read it, and then reflect for awhile what a dreary and desolate page would this life present if the Sabbath were blotted out from our calculation.

“Yokefellow! think how the abstraction of the Sabbath would hopelessly enslave the working classes with whom we are identified. Think of labor going on in one monotonous and eternal cycle, limbs forever on the rack, the fingers forever straining, the brow forever sweating, the feet forever plodding, the brain forever throbbing, the shoulders forever drooping, the loins forever aching, and the restless mind forever scheming.

“Think of the beauty it would efface, the merry-heartedness it would extinguish, of the giant strength it would tame, of the resources of nature it would breed, of the projects it would wreck, of the groans it would extort, of the lives it would immolate, and of the cheerless graves it would prematurely dig! See them toiling and moiling, sweating and fretting, grinding and hewing, weaving and spinning, strewing and gathering, mowing and reaping, razing and building, digging and planting, striving and struggling—in the granary and barn, in the factory and in the mill, in the warehouse and in the shop, on the mountain and in the ditch, on the roadside and in the wood, in the city and in the country, on the sea and on the shore, in the day of brightness and of gloom. What a picture would the world present if we had no Sabbath!”