They would be as claimed by the writer. But besides all this, it will be discovered that the basis of the whole transaction, both in the case of the sponge and the vessel, is fraud, deceit, and force. Stupefy a man with narcotics for twenty-four hours; or nail him down under the hatches of a circumnavigating vessel; break the compass; send him round the world; let the whole community conspire to falsify the facts in the case; do not let him know where he has been; falsify the truth regarding the day observed by first-day keepers; and then, forsooth, you have changed the practice, if not convinced the judgment, of a little handful of conscientious, definite Sabbath-day keepers. Wonderful, gentlemen! Wonderful in the extreme! What results for such prodigious efforts! Alas, for truth, when it must pass such an ordeal as this! We blush, but not for ourselves. We would almost be willing to inhale the anesthetic or run the hazard of the voyage at sea, taking our chances respecting the proper preservation of the heaven-appointed day of rest, if, by so doing, we might prevent our brethren of the Amendment school, for whose welfare we have the most earnest desire, from making so sorry a show of the low estimate which they place upon the importance of employing in a controversy like this arguments which appeal only to the Christian’s head and heart, instead of those which appeal to the baser faculties of the mind.
A summary of the ground traveled in this rejoinder would run somewhat as follows: 1. That in adopting the seventh-part-of-time theory, the gentleman has abandoned the definite first day which he sought to establish in the first nine of his articles. 2. That the seventh-part-of-time theory is just as fatal to the Sunday as it is to the Sabbath. 3. That it overturns the practicability of the Constitutional Amendment, since it seeks to enforce a definite day, and since, according to it, Sabbatarians have a Bible right to observe the seventh day in the exercise of a divinely given choice of days. 4. That it is possible to establish the identity of the last day of the week at the present time with that upon which God rested at the completion of the creation; from the providential manner in which God pointed it out in the exodus from Egypt; the fact that Christ and his disciples kept the Sabbath according to the commandment; the general agreement among Jews, Christians, and heathen concerning its place in the week from that time to this. 5. That the objection concerning the conflict between a definite Sabbath and the laws of nature at the poles does not array the God of nature against himself or our version of his commandment, since the trouble does not imply any want of foresight on the part of the Deity, but rather a disregard of the plainest teachings of both providence and nature on the part of those who have placed themselves where it was never designed that men should locate. 6. That if a definite day is impossible, then the wisdom of God is impeached, since, both by the letter of the commandment and by his providential interpretation of it for forty years, that is the very thing which it inculcates. 7. That a definite day can be kept on the eastern continent, since this had been done for hundreds of years before the change of the law will be even claimed. 8. That a definite day can be observed on the western continent, since this is the very object which the Constitutional Amendment is designed to secure. 9. That the trip around the world would render it as impossible to keep an exact seventh part of time as it would a definite seventh day. 10. That the seventh-part-of-time theory would introduce into society the direst confusion, defeating even the administration of justice. 11. That, practically, the whole world from the extreme east to the extreme west does keep a definite day. 12. That the loss and gain of time creates no disturbance except in the crossing of the Pacific Ocean. 13. That with a definite day, there must be a day line. 14. That that day line is, by the uniform practice of nations, and the providence of God, which renders it impossible that it should exist anywhere else, drawn through the Pacific Ocean. 15. That it only remains for us to do just what we are doing and have been doing for centuries in order to prove by actual demonstration that all the difficulties in the way of a definite Sabbath can be readily disposed of by those who are desirous of keeping the law of God as it reads.