Sabbath Desecration Increasing

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

Sabbath Desecration Increasing.

The complaint of religious papers all over the land is that Sabbath desecration, especially in American cities, is largely increasing. Now we say that this is all a mistake. Sabbath desecration is not increasing. There is not so much of it this year as there was last. In fact, there are not so many by some thirty thousand, now desecrating the Sabbath, as there were a few years ago. But with the exception of this comparatively small number, all Christendom, priests and people, ministers and laymen, alike, are desecrating the Sabbath, trampling it beneath their feet, riding over it rough shod, making it the pack-horse of the drudgery of the week, and in every way, so far as its claims to sacredness are concerned, consciously or unconsciously, heaping upon it every dishonor. We do not expect this desecration will cease while sin reigns, and the first great apostate is still at large; but we do expect that multitudes more will turn away their feet from trampling it down before the Lord appears.

The mistake our friends make when they complain of increasing Sabbath desecration is, that they take Sunday for the Sabbath. Let any one who has taken only his A B C in the investigation of the Sabbath question read the following from the Commercial Advocate of San Francisco, Cal., and be astonished at the utter confusion which still exists in some minds in regard to the Sabbath and Sunday:—

“That we are fast becoming Europeanized as it regards the observance of the Christian Sabbath, there is no shadow of doubt. This has, in reality, become, with all our large cities, the great holiday of holidays. This is the day when the millions resort, with display of banners and bayonets, to the target fields, to the beer gardens, the dog and prize fights, and to the theaters. The old usages and conventionalities of the men and women who founded the Republic, and who guided it for the first half century, are trodden under foot as the fossilizations of the bygone or relics of the antique, ill adapted to the advanced ideas of European materialism and modern American atheism. To strike from the ethical code of the nation any one of the ten commandments, is to repudiate the whole. And a people, the pillars of whose political and moral edifice do not rest upon these everlasting corner-stones of human government, is momentarily tottering to its fall. Though promulgated to the Hebrews long centuries ago, still the impress of the signet of the Eternal is as fresh upon them to-day, as a governmental code for the Gentiles, as when they were being written amidst the flashings and thunder shocks of Sinai. These ten great moral postulates cannot be abrogated by civilized society without revolution and dissolution. And the American who attempts this is guilty of civil as well as moral treason.”

Think of this! the impress of the signet of the Eternal fresh upon the ten commandments to-day, as a code for the Gentiles, and yet the fourth commandment taken to enforce Sunday! And think of what is more wonderful still—that this extract, as given above, is printed in The Christian Statesman, whose editor, since his recent debate with Eld. Littlejohn on the Sabbath question, is without a shadow of excuse for thus confounding the sacred and the profane.