A SINGULAR CONFESSION

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 13, 1879

A SINGULAR CONFESSION.

We had hoped that Christendom would awake by-and-by to the fact that they have no right to use the term Sabbath to designate the first day of the week; for it does not belong to it, viewed from any standpoint, either human or divine. So used it is a misnomer and a falsehood; and if this distinction could come to be clearly recognized, it would go far toward setting the Sabbath question in its true light before the world. But the reader will see how far this is from being the case when he learns that The Christian Instructor comes out with a humble confession that it has committed an “unpardonable oversight,” and been guilty of conduct that is “flagrantly offensive,” because it has in two or three instances applied to the first day of the week the “semi-barbaric and wholly heathenish name Sunday,” instead of “the beautiful and scriptural” name Sabbath. This is one of the most remarkable instances in which an action which is just right has been confessed as “an unpardonable oversight” and “flagrantly offensive.” We can assure the Instructor that its confession is wholly uncalled for and out of place. When it applies the beautiful and scriptural name Sabbath, which belongs to the holy rest-day of God and to that only—when it applies this sacred name to the first-day Sabbath which is half semi-barbaric and heathen and half papal, it may then come down with a confession of something which is an unpardonable oversight and flagrantly offensive. No man has any more right to call the first day of the week by the name Sabbath, than he has to call Jehovah Beelzebub, or Christ Mohammed.