Sabbath-Keeping and Sunday Rest
By L. A. S.
In a report of the annual meeting of the Ontario Lord's Day Alliance which appears in a Brantford, Ontario, paper we note this paragraph stating the attitude of the Alliance toward observers of the seventh day:— Rev. J. S. Stuart, of London, said that the Seventh-day Adventists had been resting on Saturday and working on Sunday. They had been notified that all illegal employment must be discontinued on the sabbath, though they might rest on Saturday too if they wished. There is an intimation in the last sentence that the authority which forbids work on Sunday reserves the right to forbid rest on Saturday should such action be deemed necessary in the interests of the first-day sabbath. At present the Lord's Day Alliance is willing to allow observers of the seventh day to rest on that day, if they rest on Sunday as well. They can observe the day which they believe to be the Sabbath of the Lord, on condition that they show the same honor to another day which has become a rival institution. This, however, is what Jehovah has forbidden. He is a jealous God, and will tolerate no rival. No man can serve Jehovah and any other god at the same time. The Creator must have the entire allegiance of his creature, or none; and to serve any other master is to fail to honor Jehovah. And this is reasonable, since Jehovah by virtue of being man's Creator has every claim upon all the capabilities with which man has been endowed. He has the right of sole proprietorship in all his creatures. The power that is behind the Sunday sabbath, and against the seventh-day Sabbath, is satisfied if men will merely fail to honor the seventh day as God has commanded. He who tries to serve God and Mammon really serves Mammon wholly, and God not at all. God demands entire allegiance and obedience on man's part, and can not accept anything less. The power that is behind Sunday is willing that a man should rest on the seventh day as well as on the first; but God, who ordained the seventh day as the Sabbath, can not allow the observance of any other weekly day of rest. He has set apart the seventh day from all other days of the week, making that the rest day, while other days are working days. This distinction he commands man to preserve, and to observe any other weekly rest day is to dishonor the Sabbath day and its Creator. It is not a long step, however, from the prohibition of work on Sunday, to the prohibition of rest on the Sabbath. The seventh-day keeper has only to be arrested for non-observance of Sunday, and put into prison or the chain-gang, to find himself in circumstances where his conscientious desire to rest on Saturday will be contemptuously disregarded. The Sunday law first makes him a “criminal,” and then, because he is such, refuses him the right which previously it made a show of granting him. The whole history of Sunday and of Sunday legislation shows that there can be no compromise between that institution and the seventh-day Sabbath. As there can be but one God, so there can be but one Sabbath and one weekly rest day in the belief and practise of God's people.