p. 189 | Men and Things by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 28, 1872

Men and Things.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

METEORS—FALLING STARS.

Christ and the prophets have said that as a sign of the end the stars would fall. We claim that this was fulfilled in the wonderful meteoric shower of 1833. But it is objected that these were simply meteors, and not really stars, as the prophecy names. Though this objection has been refuted repeatedly, yet here is another high authority for the fact that these meteors are really falling stars. It is from the Christian Union of May 1, 1872:—

“The gold medal of the British Royal Astronomical Society was presented in February to Signor Schiaparelli, for his researches upon the nature and orbits of meteors, which have helped to demonstrate that these bodies belong to the stellar region, and are in fact falling stars.”

This is a good witness to an important fact. “The stars shall fall.” This is fulfilled.

THE NATIONS PREPARING FOR WAR.

Of the time of the end, the Revelator says, “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead that they should be judged,” &c. Rev. 11:18. This very condition of things is rapidly developing. The same paper, of the same date, says:—

“The military organization proposed for France sends every man into the army from the age of twenty to twenty-five, and into successive stages of the reserve for the three succeeding periods of five years. This is severer than the German conscription, which requires active service for only three years. It would be a terrible burden on the industry of the country, a deliberate devotion of the nation’s whole energy to a military career. The great Continental powers seem entering on a new competition, in organizing, by the highest arts of civilization, the most barbarous forces—national jealousies and hatreds.”

NO AUTHORITY FOR SUNDAY.

That Sunday has not been kept in other countries and other ages as it is now in our own country, is a fact of which the people are not generally informed. Relying largely on what the preacher has taught them without investigating for themselves, Americans have come to believe that Sunday is the same sacred day the world over as it is here, and that it has ever been such since the resurrection of Christ. Well-informed ministers certainly know better than this, and here and there they will let it out. Thus Mr. Beecher, in a recent sermon, made these concessions on this subject:—

“So far as the Christian Sunday, or Lord’s day, is concerned, we have no command in the New Testament as to the mode in which it is to be observed. We have scarcely more than the recognition that it was observed, in addition to the old Jewish Sabbath. We have neither from the primitive church, nor from the Scriptures, any hint, explicit and binding, as to the mode of observing it. . . . . . . .

“I do not think that we have received our Lord’s day on the ground of absolute command. Certainly the Jewish Sabbath is not ours. We cannot, therefore, divine from that Sabbath how this day ought to be kept. . . . . . . .

“This is a day peculiarly American. Not that it has not been observed in all countries, but that perhaps nowhere else, from the very founding of the colonies, has there been an institution which has been like the New England and the American Sunday—the day of rest—the one religious day. In other lands, it has been partly religious, or it has been a day of games and exhibitions and sports, with a little preliminary ruffle of church, and all the rest of the garment of anything; but it was in America that the Lord’s day dawned, as it were, with the light of the other world shining over its brow.”

“Our Lord’s day has come to us strained through the usages of the medieval age and church; but largely we have received it from the hands of our Puritan ancestors. Seeing the frivolity, the secular wastefulness which occurred on that day, they were, by stress of circumstances, I think, driven to the opposite extreme; and they made the day so exclusively a day of moral teaching and self-restraint that it comes down to us with bars and bolts which did not belong to the primitive Lord’s day, and which reason does not justify.”

“No command in the New Testament” for it, not received in the place of the old Sabbath, but is peculiarly an American institution made by the austerity of the Puritans; while “in other lands it has been partly religious, or it has been a day of games and exhibitions and sports.” These are important facts as far as they go, though they do not tell the whole truth. Ask your German, French, or Irish neighbor, how Sunday is observed in the old country, and he will tell you of a very different observance from what we see here. Hence it is that these foreigners are troubling our American Sunday-keepers so much about keeping that day. They want to keep it just as they always have in the old country, i. e., as a day of recreation and pleasure. The fact is, the farther we come, both in time and distance, from the origin of Sunday celebration, the more faith people have in it. Thus it always is with error.

D. M. CANRIGHT.

High Forest, Minn.