NO SABBATH | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 27, 1876

NO SABBATH.

In a prize essay on the Sabbath, written by a journeyman printer in Scotland, which, for singular power of language and beauty of expression, has never been surpassed, there occurs the following passage. Read it, then reflect for awhile what a dreary and desolate page would this life present if the Sabbath were blotted out from our civilization:—

“Yoke-fellow! think how the abstraction of the Sabbath would hopelessly enslave the working classes with whom we are identified. Think of labor thus going on in one monotonous and eternal cycle, limbs straining, the brow forever on the rack, the fingers forever straining, the brow forever sweating, the feet forever plodding, the brain forever throbbing, the shoulders forever drooping, the loins forever aching, the restless mind forever scheming. Think of the beauty it would efface, the merry-heartedness it would extinguish, of the giant strength it would tame, of the resources of nature it would crush, of the sickness it would breed, of the projects it would wreck, of the groans it would extort, of the lives it would immolate, and of the cheerless graves it would prematurely dig! See mankind toiling and moiling, sweating and fretting, grinding and hewing, weaving and spinning, sowing and gathering, mowing and reaping, raising and building, digging and planting, striving and struggling in the garden and in the field, in the granary and in the barn, in the factory and in the mill, in the warehouse and in the shop, on the mountain and in the ditch, on the roadside and in the wood, in the city, and in the country, out at sea and on the shore, in the days of brightness and of gloom. What a picture would the world present if we had no Sabbath!”