ONE MORE DODGE by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 11, 1877

ONE MORE DODGE.

By Uriah Smith

We met a man on the New York camp-ground whose inventive faculties favored him with a novel device to save the testimony of Acts 20: 7, to the side of Sunday-keeping. With a great flourish of trumpets he had claimed that the book of Acts set forth the first day of the week as the only Sabbath for this dispensation, and appealed to this passage to prove it. But when confronted with the fact that there is no other record in all the New Testament of a religious meeting on the first day of the week, and that this meeting was not held in the daytime, but in the evening, because there were many lights in the upper chamber, he was exceedingly loth to give up the idea that this was a day meeting. So to get over the little matter of the “many lights in the upper chamber,” he undertook to account for them on the ground that the disciples, for fear of the Jews, had to assemble privately, and bar their doors and darken their windows with heavy drapery, so that lights would be necessary even in the daytime! Thus he would have us understand that the service was held at about the usual hour of Sunday worship, 10:30 A. M. But how it was that Paul continued his speech from that hour till midnight, he did not tell us, and we are unable to imagine, unless it was that his hearers themselves became so bewildered in that day-darkened room, as to suppose that noon was midnight, and that the writer of the book of Acts was himself misled in regard to it. Nor can we imagine how Eutychus should fall into such a “deep sleep” right there in midday. Nor did our friend tell us which side of this heavy curtain Eutychus sat; whether he was on the outside of the curtain, having that between himself and Paul while he was preaching, and so fell out of the window, or whether he was on the inside of the curtain, and when he fell out, fell through the curtain, perhaps taking curtain and all with him.

At any rate, this novel supposition needs to be arranged in some way so that it will not come into direct conflict with truth, to have several mountains of inconsistencies under which it lies buried, removed from it, and to be given at least one leg to stand upon, before it can present any respectable claim to consideration. U. S.