In presenting further evidence to show what power it is that has changed the Sabbath, we quote again from the “Catholic Christian Instructed”:— “Ques. What warrant have you for keeping the Sunday, preferable to the ancient Sabbath, which was the Saturday?” “Ans. We have for it the authority of the Catholic church, and apostolic tradition.” “Q. Does the Scripture anywhere command the Sunday to be kept for the Sabbath?” “A. The Scripture commands us to hear the church (Matt. 18:17; Luke 10:16), and to hold fast the traditions of the apostles. 2 Thess. 2:15. But the Scriptures do not in particular mention this change of the Sabbath. John speaks of the Lord’s day (Rev. 1:10); but he does not tell us what day of the week this was, much less does he tell us that this day was to take the place of the Sabbath ordained in the commandments. Luke also speaks of the disciples’ meeting together to break bread on the first day of the week. Acts 20:7. And Paul (1 Cor. 16:2) orders that on the first day of the week the Corinthians should lay by in store what they designed to bestow in charity on the faithful in Judea; but neither the one nor the other tells us that the first day of the week was to be henceforth the day of worship and the Christian Sabbath; so that truly the best authority we have for this is the testimony and ordinance of the church. And, therefore, those who pretend to be so religious of the Sunday, whilst they take no notice of other festivals ordained by the same church authority, show that they act by humor, and not by reason and religion; since Sundays and holy days all stand upon the same foundation, viz., the ordinance of the church.”—Cath. Christian Instructed, pp. 209–211. The “Doctrinal Catechism,” pp. 101, 174, 351–355, offers proof that Protestants are not guided by Scripture. We present two of the questions and answers:— “Ques. Have you any other way of proving that the church has power to institute festivals of precept?” “Ans. Had she not such power, she could not have done that in which all modern religionists agree with her—she could not have substituted the observance of Sunday, the first day of the week, for the observance of Saturday, the seventh day, a change for which there is no scriptural authority.” “Q. When Protestants do profane work upon Saturday, or the seventh day of the week, do they follow the Scripture as their only rule of faith—do they find this permission clearly laid down in the Sacred Volume?” “A. On the contrary, they have only the authority of tradition for this practice. In profaning Saturday, they violate one of God’s commandments, which he has never clearly abrogated—‘Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.’” Then follows a statement and refutation of the arguments Protestants usually rely on to prove the change of the Sabbath, such as the resurrection of Christ, the pouring out of the Spirit, the Lord’s day of Rev. 1:10; Acts 20:7; and 1 Cor. 16:2, showing that these scriptures contain no evidence of the institution of Sunday observance, but that the practice rests solely upon the authority of the Catholic church. In a Roman Catholic work entitled, “The Shortest Way to End Disputes about Religion,” p. 19, by the Rev. Robert Manning, approved by the Rt. Rev. Bishop Fitzpatrick, Coadjutor of the Diocese of Boston, Mass., we find the following:— “As zealous as Protestants are against the Church’s infallibility, they are forced to depend wholly upon her authority in many articles that cannot be evidently proved from any text of Scripture, yet are of very great importance.” “1. The lawfulness for Christians to work upon Saturday, contrary, in appearance, to the express command of God, who bids us ‘keep the Sabbath holy,’ and tells us the seventh day of the week is that day.” “2. The lawfulness and validity of infant baptism, whereof there is no example in Scripture.” A QUESTION FOR ALL BIBLE CHRISTIANS.
In accordance with the instruction given in the catechisms from which the foregoing quotations are made, a Catholic tract under the above title makes a precise statement of the positions held respectively by Catholics and Protestants on this question, in the following forcible language:— “I am going to propose a very plain and serious question, to which I would entreat all who profess to follow ‘the Bible, and the Bible only,’ to give their most earnest attention. It is this: Why do you not keep holy the Sabbath day? diligently go to church, and say your prayers, and read your Bible at home every Sunday of your lives.” “But Sunday is not the Sabbath day. Sunday is the first day of the week; the Sabbath day was the seventh day of the week. Almighty God did not give a commandment that men should keep holy one day in seven; but he named his own day, and said distinctly, ‘Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day;’ and he assigned a reason for choosing this day rather than any other—a reason which belongs only to the seventh day of the week, and cannot be applied to the rest. He says, ‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.’” “Almighty God ordered that all men should rest from their labor on the seventh day because he too had rested on that day; he did not rest on Sunday but on Saturday. On Sunday, which is the first day of the week, he began the work of creation, he did not finish it; it was on Saturday that he ‘ended’ his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made; and God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.’ Gen. 2:2, 3. Nothing can be more plain and easy to be understood than all this; and there is nobody who attempts to deny it; it is acknowledged by everybody that the day which Almighty God appointed to be kept holy was Saturday, not Sunday. Why do you, then, keep holy the Sunday, and not the Saturday?” “You tell me that Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, but that the Christian Sabbath has been changed to Sunday. Changed! but by whom? Who has authority to change an express command of Almighty God? When God has spoken and said, Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day, who shall dare to say, Nay, thou mayest work and do all manner of worldly business on the seventh day; but thou shalt keep holy the first day, in its stead? This is the most important question, which I know not how you can answer.” “You are a Protestant and you profess to go by the Bible, and the Bible only; and yet in so important a matter as the observance of one day in seven as a holy day, you go against the plain letter of the Bible, and put another day in the place of that day which the Bible has commanded. The command to keep holy the seventh day is one of the ten commandments; you believe that the other nine are still binding; who gave you authority to tamper with the fourth? If you are consistent with your own principles, if you really follow the Bible, and the Bible only, you ought to be able to produce some portion of the New Testament in which this fourth commandment is expressly altered, or at least from which you may confidently infer that it was the will of God that Christians should make that change in its observance which you have made.” “The present generation of Protestants keep Sunday holy instead of Saturday, because they received it as a part of the Christian religion from the last generation, and that generation received it from the generation before, and so on, backward, from one generation to another, by a continual succession, until we come to the time of the (so-called) Reformation, when it so happened that those who conducted the change of religion in this country left this particular portion of Catholic faith and practice untouched.” “But, had it happened otherwise—had some one or other of the ‘Reformers’ taken it into his head to denounce the observance of Sunday as a popish corruption and superstition, and to insist upon it that Saturday was the day which God had appointed to be kept holy, and that he had never authorized the observance of any other—all Protestants would have been obliged, in obedience to their professed principle of following the Bible, and the Bible only, either to acknowledge this teaching as true, and to return to the observance of the ancient Sabbath, or else to deny that there is any Sabbath at all. And so, in like manner, any one at the present day who should set about, honestly and without prejudice, to draw up for himself a form of religious belief and practice out of the written word of God, must needs come to the same conclusion; he must either believe that the Sabbath is still binding upon men’s consciences, because of the divine command, ‘Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day;’ or he must believe that no Sabbath at all is binding upon them, because of the apostolic injunction, ‘Let no man judge you in respect of a festival day, or of the sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ’s.’ Either one or the other of these conclusions he might honestly come to; but he would know nothing whatever of a Christian Sabbath, distinct from the ancient, celebrated on a different day, and observed in a different manner, simply because holy Scripture itself nowhere speaks of such a thing.” “Now mind, in all this, you would greatly misunderstand me, if you supposed I was quarreling with you for acting in this manner on a true and right principle—in other words, a Catholic principle, viz., the acceptance, without hesitation, of that which has been handed down to you by an unbroken tradition. I would not tear from you a single one of those shreds and fragments of divine truth which you have retained. God forbid! They are the most precious things you possess, and by God’s blessing may serve as clues to bring you out of that labyrinth of error in which you find yourselves involved, far more by the fault of your forefathers, three centuries ago, than by your own. What I do quarrel with you for, is not your inconsistency in occasionally acting on a true principle, but your adoption, as a general rule, of a false one. You keep the Sunday, and not the Saturday; and you do so rightly, for this was the practice of all Christians when Protestantism began; but you have abandoned other Catholic observances, which were equally universal at that day, preferring the novelties introduced by the men who invented Protestantism to the unvarying tradition of above fifteen hundred years.” “We blame you not for making Sunday your weekly holiday, instead of Saturday, but for rejecting tradition, which is the only safe and clear rule by which this observance can be justified. In outward act, we do the same as yourselves in this matter; we, too, no longer observe the ancient Sabbath, but Sunday, in its stead; but then there is this important difference between us, that we do not pretend, as you do, to derive our authority for so doing from a book, but we derive it from a living teacher, and that teacher is the church. Moreover, we believe that not everything which God would have us to know and to do is written in the Bible, but that there is an unwritten word of God, which we are bound to believe and obey, just as we believe and obey the Bible itself, according to that saying of the apostle, ‘Stand fast, and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle.’ 2 Thess. 2:14.” “We Catholics, then, have precisely the same authority for keeping Sunday holy, instead of Saturday, as we have for every other article of our creed, namely, the authority of ‘the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth;’ 2 Tim. 3:15; whereas, you who are Protestants have really no authority for it whatever; for there is no authority for it in the Bible, and you will not allow that there can be authority for it anywhere else. Both you and we do, in fact, follow tradition in this matter; but we follow it, believing it to be a part of God’s word, and the church to be42its divinely-appointed guardian and interpreter; you follow it, denouncing it all the time as a fallible and treacherous guide, which often makes the commandment of God of none effect.” In another Catholic work, called a “Treatise of Thirty Controversies,” we find the following cutting reproof:— “The word of God commandeth the seventh day to be the Sabbath of our Lord, and to be kept holy; you [Protestants] without any precept of Scripture, change it to be the first day of the week, only authorized by our traditions. Divers English Puritans oppose, against this point, that the observation of the first day is proved out of Scripture, where it is said, the first day of the week. Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10. Have they not spun a fair thread in quoting these places? If we should produce no better for purgatory, prayers for the dead, invocation of the saints, and the like, they might have good cause indeed to laugh us to scorn; for where is it written that these were Sabbath days in which those meetings were kept? Or where is it ordained they should be always observed? Or, which is the sum of all, where is it decreed that the observation of the first day should abrogate or abolish the sanctifying of the seventh day, which God commanded everlastingly to be kept holy? Not one of those is expressed in the written word of God.” And finally, W. Lockhart, B. A. of Oxford, in the Toronto (Cath.) Mirror, offered the following “challenge” to all the Protestants of Ireland; a challenge as well calculated for this latitude as that. He says:— “I do, therefore, solemnly challenge the Protestants of Ireland to prove, by plain texts of Scripture, the questions concerning the obligation 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. 3. That they are not bound to keep holy the seventh day also.” This is what the papal power claims to have done respecting the fourth commandment. Catholics plainly acknowledge that there is no scriptural authority for the change they have made, but that it rests wholly upon the authority of the church; and they claim it as a token or mark of the authority of that church; the “very act of changing the Sabbath into Sunday” being set forth as proof of its power in this respect. That many should suppose that Christ wrought this change is not strange; for they have been so taught. But this misapprehension should no longer exist; for, according to the prophecy, the only change ever to be made in the law of God was to be made by the little horn of Daniel 7, and the man of sin of 2 Thess. 2; and the only change that has been made in it is the change of the Sabbath. Now, if Christ made this change, he filled the office of the blasphemous power spoken of by both Daniel and Paul—a conclusion sufficiently hideous to drive any Christian from the view which leads thereto. But why should any one labor to prove that Christ changed the Sabbath? Whoever does this is performing a thankless task. The pope will not thank him; for if it is proved that Christ wrought this change, then the pope is robbed of his badge of authority and power. And no truly enlightened Protestant will thank him; for if he succeeds, he only shows that the papacy has not done the work which it was predicted that it should do, and so that the prophecy has failed, and the Scriptures are unreliable. The matter had better stand as the prophecy has placed it; and the claim which the pope unwittingly puts forth had better be granted. When a person is charged with any work, and that person steps forth and confesses that he has done the work, that is usually considered sufficient to settle the matter. So, when the prophecy affirms that a certain power shall change the law of God, and that very power in due time arises, does the work foretold, and then openly claims that he has done it, what need have we of further evidence? The world should not forget that the great apostasy foretold by Paul has taken place; that the man of sin for long ages held almost a monopoly of Christian teaching in the world; that the mystery of iniquity has cast the darkness of its shadow and the errors of its doctrines over almost all Christendom; and out of this era of error and darkness and corruption, the theology of our day has come. Would it then be anything strange if there were yet some relics of popery to be discarded ere the Reformation will be complete? A. Campbell (Baptism, p. 15), speaking of the different Protestant sects, says:— “All of them retain in their bosom, in their ecclesiastic organizations, worship, doctrines, and observances, various relics of popery. They are, at best, reformations of popery, and only reformations in part. The doctrines and traditions of men yet impair the power and progress of the gospel in their hands.” Therefore, let the reader beware, lest he make the mistake of supposing he is following the Lord Jesus Christ, while he is only following his pretended vicegerent, the Antichrist of Rome.