Your ShelfYour Projects

A Challenge

14%

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jan 4, 1877

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 3, No. 2.

Read the full edition

A Challenge.

Look at the following challenge:—“I say, then, that I am a Catholic, by the grace of God, because I was led to see that some other authority besides the Bible, and the Bible only, was necessary in order to prove many of the very truths which all Protestants admit to be essential to Christianity. Protestants deny this, and declare that nothing is necessary to be believed but what can be proved from the Bible, and the Bible only, namely, from plain texts of scripture. The whole question is, therefore, reduced into a nut-shell: in proof or disproof of this lies the proof or disproof of Protestantism. I do, therefore, solemnly challenge the Protestants of Ireland to prove, by plain texts of Scripture, the questions concerning the obligations of the Christian Sabbath. 1. That Christians may work on Saturday, the old seventh-day. 2. That they are bound to keep holy the first day, namely, Sunday. 2. That they are not bound to keep holy the seventh day also.”—Extract from W. Lockhart, late B. A. of Oxford, Toronto (Cath.).
What Catholics thus charge is substantially admitted and confirmed by the following Protestant writers, and many more who might be quoted:—
The Augsburg Confession, drawn up by Melancthon, says: “The observance of the Lord’s day is founded not on any commandment of God, but on the authority of the church, and that the church may alter the day at pleasure.”—Cox’s Sab. Manual, part 2, ch. 6, sect. 3 and 5.
Dr. Haylin says: “Take which you will, either the fathers or the moderns, and we shall find no Lord’s day instituted by any apostolic mandate; no Sabbath set on foot by them upon the first day of the week.”—Hist. of the Sabbath, part 2, ch. 1, sect. 10.
Sir William Domville says: “Not any ecclesiastical writer of the first three centuries attributed the origin of Sunday observance either to Christ or his apostles.”—Examination of six texts, Supplement, pp. 6, 7.
Neander says: “‘The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intention of the apostles to establish a divine command in this respect—far from them and the early apostolic church to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday.”—English Tract.