The Sabbath of the Seventh-Day Baptists
By A. H. Lewis
From the N. Y. Independent. The Sabbath of the Seventh-Day Baptists.
To the Editor of the Independent: An article, entitled “German-American,” by Rev. Robert M. Hatfield, in the Independent of April 18, 1867, demands a brief notice. Speaking of the Sunday, he says: “The Puritan Sabbath is as effete as the German Sabbath is revolutionary. You can neither re-establish the one nor defend the other. Why not then restate this Sunday question from the New Testament standpoint, rather than from the Old; from Christ’s first day, rather than from Moses’ seventh? No one observes Moses’ Sabbath. Had we not better give it up, and make sure of Christ’s?” I agree that the “Puritan Sabbath” is a thing of the past. It can never regain the power and place which it has lost. I know that the German Sabbath is “revolutionary.” It is more. It is unscriptural. It is a breeder of immorality and vice; of religious dearth, decay, and death. Nor is it less evident that the “Anglo-American Sabbath”—a compromise between the German and the Puritan—is only a temporary effort to save a part of the one and avoid the legitimate results of the other. It, too, must be as ephemeral as it is unscriptural. But I have taken my pen mainly to ask your correspondent to be more exact and just in his statements concerning what he is pleased to call “Moses’ Sabbath.” He says, “No one observes Moses’ Sabbath.” I have the honor to belong to a denomination of Christians who observe and labor to defend the “Sabbath of the Lord,” the seventh-day of the week. Their present denominational organization was developed contemporary with the Puritan movement of the sixteenth century, in England. Their organization in America dates from the year 1671, since which time there has been a slow but steady growth. The early Seventh-day Baptists of Europe reach back through the convulsions of the Reformation, and link with the Sabbath-keeping Dissenters of Ante-Reformation times, and so back to Christ himself. It is a most patent fact in history that the Sabbath was observed in nearly all parts of the early Church for from three to five hundred years after Christ, and was only driven out by civil and ecclesiastico-civil enactments; while those branches of the church in Africa and Asia which have never been subject to the Papacy, observe the Sabbath to this day. If we are unknown to your correspondent, because we are not of modern origin, he ought not to forget that the Seventh-day Adventists—a body entirely distinct from ourselves, but earnest defenders of the Sabbath—have been developed within the last twenty-five years, and now number, in our own country, half as many thousand communicants as they are years old. We are not anxious to be known simply as Seventh-day Baptists. But, in these times, when men are pleading for other Sabbaths and for “no Sabbaths,” for other laws and for “no laws,” we desire to be known as observers of God’s Sabbath and defenders of his law. The rationalism of Germany, the infidelity of France, and the ritualism of England, are fruits we pray may not be reproduced in America. Hence, we plead for the supremacy of God’s eternal laws, as the only safeguard against such results, believing that the American Church must soon choose licentious no lawism, and debasing no Sabbathism, or accept the truth that all God’s laws in the decalogue are unchangeable and binding in all times, upon all peoples. Trusting that you will deem this correction worthy a place in your columns, I remain, Yours truly, A. H. LEWIS. Pastor of the Seventh-day Baptist church, New York City.