THE SABBATH QUESTION IN BOSTON.
[Bro. C. K. Drury sends us the following from the Boston Daily Journal for the Review.] The weekly meeting of the Baptist ministers was held in the vestry of Tremont Temple yesterday at 10 o'clock, Rev. J. C. Foster, of Randolph, in the chair. After prayer and singing, Dr. Gardner, secretary of the Baptist Missionary Union, opened the discussion of the morning upon the subject of the Sabbath. He said he looked upon the Sabbath as a sort of physical gospel, and of the greatest importance in the Christian economy. He thought there might be a wrong choice of arguments in defending the observance of the day. If there were any arguments which resulted badly for the day, he thought they ought to be re-examined. The Christian Sabbath grew up. The question was, How did it grow? from an old root or from a new seed planted at the birth of our dispensation? He believed in the former most decidedly, and that there was an old Sabbatical law older than the Jewish dispensation, from which both that and the Christian Sabbath were derived. As a proof of this, he referred to the constant allusions to a Sabbath and a week as a division of time in the patriarchal ages. The Sabbatic law received a special annunciation for the world on Sinai. It was not then instituted, but only re-enunciated. He had heard that it had been said there that the fourth commandment had been abrogated. He asked where was the man who had authority to say that a word of God, written by his finger on stone, had been abrogated. For his part, he believed the decalogue to be not a part of the ceremonial, but the moral, law, meant not for Jews, but for all time. The fact that God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it at the time of creation was, to the speaker's mind, an evidence of the intended perpetuity of the law. The ten commands of the decalogue were written on stone, and that was still another evidence that they were meant to last. The ceremonial law was given in a different way. The moral law is referred to in the New Testament as the “lively oracles of God,” and in many other terms. It is nowhere abrogated. Christ himself said, “The Sabbath is made for man,” not for the Jews, but for every man. He did not know how it struck others, but for one he could not find in the example of the apostles a sufficient foundation for the Sabbath. He must go back to the old Sabbatical law of the Old Testament to find his primary reason for a belief in the day. Having that, the allusions to the day in the New Testament become important, though without the former, the latter are insufficient to make a reason for the day. Rev. Mr. Nott, of Wakefield, said he could not conceive why God should have recorded the Genesical institution of the Sabbath had not he meant it as an eternal law. He considered Dr. Gardner's position as to its perpetuity as a part of the moral law of the decalogue to be impregnable. Paul speaks frequently of a moral law, evidently referring to the decalogue, which he thus admits to be perpetual. But some say the fourth commandment is an exception, belongs to the ceremonial, not the moral, law. He felt such a position to be absurd. The decalogue stands or falls together. Rev. Mr. Richardson, of Medford, thought that the work of Jesus in regard to the Sabbath was to purify it from Judaism, which he defined as a corruption of the Mosaic law. It was a pure assumption to consider the Sabbath as a Jewish ordinance. He felt that the ground for the Sabbath was in the fact that God “rested,” not in the day itself. Dr. Hovey, of the Newton Theological Seminary, who had written a careful argument upon the subject, was invited to read it before the Conference, and will do so next week. Rev. H. C. Townley asked Dr. Gardner how he accounted for the change from the seventh to the first day of the week. Dr. Gardner responded that the change came in as a part of the change in the dispensations, necessarily. Rev. Mr. Burnham referred to the statement in Romans that the law against coveting was done away for Christians who are now under another law. Yet that was a part of the moral law, which it had been claimed could not be abrogated. There were a good many moral laws scattered through the ceremonial, and there were some moral principles which were not in the decalogue. He thought the true ground for defending the Sabbath was that Christ did not negative it, but positively enunciated it when he said, “The Sabbath was made for man.” Prof. Gould, of Newton, said that he had never been able to find from any one any moral principle involved in the observance of the Sabbath. He did not believe that any such command would be found written on the heart of any one who had not seen or heard it first written or spoken. He did not believe God would judge a heathen who never heard of the decalogue for not observing the Sabbath, because the pagan could not be expected to know of the Sabbatic law, while he could be expected to know the moral law and be held responsible under it. Several other speakers briefly discussed the question till half past eleven, when the meeting adjourned after prayer by Rev. Mr. Safford of Farmingham.