DR. GAMBLE’S “THIRTEEN-INCH ARGUMENT.”
Our contemporary, the California Christian Advocate, has the following:— Dr. S. W. Gamble, whose lectures on the Sabbath so charmed and so thoroughly convinced the California and Southern California Conferences, has consented to remain some months on the Coast, and conduct a campaign on the Sabbath question. Dr. Gamble will find a spirit of co-operation and a cordial welcome. He has invented a thirteen-inch argument, which will pierce the armor of the most approved of Saturday-sabbath arguments yet found. In fact, his outfit not only carries big guns, but is well adapted to ramming the sides of “Seventh-day-ism.” Good, we are glad of the agitation. When the smoke clears away (for Dr. Gamble does not use smokeless powder, the main part of his materials are gathered from the worn-out theories of musty medievalism), it will be found that the Sabbath cause has not been injured, nor the Sabbath ranks deprived of one believer in the Word of God. His “thirteen-inch argument” may do for those who are more anxious to find an excuse for Sunday-keeping than they are to know what the Word of God teaches, and what Jesus our Lord practised. Dr. Gamble will find some day, we pray that it may not be too late, that he has not been firing against man-made armor, but against the breastplate of God’s eternal righteousness, forged by the obedience of Jesus Christ. The main effect of the firing will be in the recoil. Dr. Gamble and his followers seem to have obtained such a tremendous sense of the importance of man-made theories and assumptions that it has blinded them to the truth of God. Both Sinai and Calvary are hidden from him by the fogs of his own generation. And, worst of all, he is blinding others as well as himself. Upon Dr. Gamble’s crusade the Pacific Christian remarks:— We are not particularly in sympathy with “Saturday Sabbath keeping,” except that we concede the sincerity of those who keep that day. And we know of no other kind of Sabbath keeping anywhere taught in the Bible. Our Adventist friends keep Saturday as the Sabbath, because they believe the Ten Commandments are forever and eternally an expression of divine authority. And the seventh day of the week is the Sabbath of the Lord, if the Decalogue is still in force. The Word of the Lord says so. And Saturday is the seventh day of the week. The theory of our “Christian” friends is that there is no Decalogue, that the unchangeable God found that He had made a mistake, that our great Example fell into the same error, and did not learn it till after the crucifixion! Fire away, brethren, but look out.