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INFATUATION

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

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 53, No. 11.

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INFATUATION

In reference to the Sunday movement in Louisville, Ky., a notice of which we gave in REVIEW No. 8, the Christian Statesman of Feb. 20 says:—
“We cannot but think this argument would have been stronger if the Scriptural term—the Sabbath, or the Lord’s day—had been employed to designate the day of rest.”
The terms Sabbath and Lord’s day are indeed Scriptural terms for the true day of rest, God’s day, the seventh day of the week. But they are not Scriptural terms to designate the first day of the week, which the Statesman has in mind. And the Statesman well knows this. It knows that the Scriptures nowhere, and in no single instance, call Sunday the Sabbath. It knows also that the Lord has in no sense whatever ever claimed the first day of the week as his, and hence that it cannot in any Scriptural sense be called the Lord’s day. And yet it has the audacity to talk about “Sabbath” and “Lord’s day” as Scriptural terms for the first day of the week. Again it says:—
“Its positions, moreover, are greatly weakened by the attempt to sustain and vindicate the Sabbath law of the State, without respect to the authority of God, and purely on physiological and social grounds.”
What the Statesman calls the “Sabbath law of the State” is simply the civil law for the first day of the week; and this it calls weak without the authority of God; but here it also well knows that there is no “authority of God” in its behalf. Where is the divine law, command, injunction, or direction, for regarding the first day of the week as the Sabbath? It does not exist, and no man is reckless enough to claim it. Yet they tacitly assume it, and speak and act as though it did exist. The fact is, the great weakness of the Sunday cause is, that it has no “authority of God” to support it; and its friends know and feel it. What, then, shall be done? As they seem determined to cling to the groundless institution, without regard to evidence, they can do no better than to assume the needed authority with the anxious hope that the ruse will succeed. But that artifice is too thin to conceal the inherent weakness of the argument; and none will be taken by it but those who want to be—those who, as the prophet says, “love to have it so.”