THE SABBATH QUESTION by J. E. PIERCE

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 15, 1901

THE SABBATH QUESTION.

By J. E. PIERCE

The Chicago American of August 6.

W. R. Hearst, Editor Chicago American.

DEAR SIR: Permit me to express my opinion that your claim that the question involved in the observation of Sunday is not merely a religious question, that it is chiefly a useful question, is unwarranted by facts.

Go with me, if you please, to the very foundation, and you will find not Sunday, but the seventh day divinely set apart as a day of rest. Thus you will see that a day has already been chosen, sanctified and blest by the Creator at the very beginning and not left to the ideas and notions of fallible man, for him to quarrel over, and for the majority to endeavor by force and persecution to compel the minority to accept. I think the Creator settled the question on the point which you claim; that is, that “one day in the week all men and all animals should rest.”

In Deut. 5:12-14 He speaks as follows, “Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.” There could be no plainer language on that point.

If the Sabbath were an institution of which man was the originator, your claim that the majority should rule would be in order; but as the matter of Sabbath observance is a matter of conscience; and no majority has any right to force the minority to yield under the circumstances. If this is chiefly a useful question, why is it that all the religious organizations are laboring so earnestly for Sunday laws, and the voice of the masses who are not interested in matters religious is unheard on the subject? The Sunday question ever has been and ever will be a “chiefly religious question.” The Fathers of the Church declared that “whatsoever ceremonies it was the custom to observe on the seventh day we have transferred to the first day of the week.”

I trust that you will publish this article, and let the readers of the Chicago American hear another side of this much-vexing “Sabbath-observance question.” J. E. PIERCE. 148 West Madison St., Chicago.