A TRACT has fallen into my hands, entitled “The Lord’s Day Proved to be a Divine Institution,” published by the American Baptist Publication and S. S. Society. It promises to “show that the change from the seventh to the first day of the week was made on the authority of Christ and his apostles,” and that it “took place naturally, and almost necessarily, from the events attending the accomplishment of redemption.” It does not claim that Christ or the apostles left on record any direction for the change, but that the change was made “SILENTLY AND GRADUALLY” “by the force of circumstances and the TACIT influence of the apostles’ doctrine.” The writer admires the wisdom manifested “in the gradual and silent introduction of the change.” He says, “No controversy arises. The seventh-day Sabbath dies without a struggle, by the force of circumstances directed by an unfailing providence. What wisdom and consideration, then, appear in the conduct of the apostles! . . . . They issued no public decree. A non-essential matter, they were assured, would find its level. How great would have been the consternation of the Jewish believers, if their Sabbath, their golden day, the first of their commandments, the badge of their nation, the glory of their state as a church, had been openly impugned! Nor could the apostles have abolished it, so far as it was a political ordinance, interwoven with the civil policy of the Jewish people. They waited therefore. They left the Jewish Sabbath gradually to expire, and the Christian to succeed, without any express command, or any attempt at a violent and sudden transfer.”
Did it ever occur to the writer, and to our Baptist friends generally, that this was the very way that immersion was changed to sprinkling in the Christian church? that immersion gradually died out, and sprinkling gradually and silently succeeded, without any express command? Did they ever admire the wisdom of the apostles, manifested in their silence in regard to this change, and in that they “left matters to work,” as this writer expresses it—left immersion gradually to expire, and sprinkling to supersede it, without an express command? Do they not rather take this emphatic silence as evidence that no such change took place by divine authority? that sprinkling is only a human ordinance? Why will they not be consistent with themselves? why reject sprinkling, because Christ and his apostles do not teach it, while they accept of a change of the Sabbath of the moral law “SILENTLY AND GRADUALLY” introduced “by the force of circumstances”?
But the closing, crowning proposition of the writer’s cumulative argument is, that the blessing of God has confirmed the change of the day. He says, “If the primitive Christians were mistaken in supposing the change from the seventh to the first day of the week to have been of apostolic authority, then God has permitted this mistake to be confirmed, and to take root, by his especial blessing, and the continued operations of his grace, during the whole period of the Christian church. . . . The blessing of God, therefore, which has actually attended, and is actually attending, in such large and perpetual operations of grace, the Lord’s day, is in full accordance with every other species of proof, and crowns the whole argument.”
It is true that a vast majority of professed Christians at the present time keep Sunday instead of the original Sabbath, though there never has been a moment since Christ, that there have not been Christian witnesses to the primitive Sabbath. It is also true that immersionists are greatly in the minority on the subject of Baptism. Did it ever occur to Baptists that God had confirmed the change from immersion to sprinkling by his special blessing? Not at all. A sufficient reply to such an argument is the apostle’s prediction that the time would come that “they should turn away their ears from the truth, and be turned to fables.” Is there any other way of knowing the truth but by going back to that which is expressly revealed in the Bible?