THE DAY LINE | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 30, 1878

THE DAY LINE.

A CORRESPONDENT asks, “Suppose I should go from California to China, arriving at China at six o’clock Friday night, all ready to begin keeping the Sabbath; but behold by their reckoning it is Saturday night. Shall I be excused from keeping the Sabbath until it comes next Friday night? Again, on my return, I land at San Francisco Saturday night at sunset, having just kept the Sabbath, but behold it is, by their time, only Friday night. Shall I keep another Sabbath? In short, Is it possible for two Sabbaths to come together, or, rather, follow each other? And is it possible for man to travel on the earth so as to have no Sabbath for two weeks?”

The solution of this difficulty lies in the question of the day line. Our correspondent should have changed the reckoning before reaching China in the one case and California in the other. Navigators add or drop their day when crossing the day line. This, for convenience of reckoning, has been fixed at the 180th meridian from Greenwich, but absolutely the line runs through Behring’s strait, for it is a line that divides the continents.

Some have supposed that the difficulty might arise in crossing this line. Thus a person, going westward, comes up to this line Friday night. He adds his day, and it immediately becomes Saturday night. On the other hand, going east, he reaches the day line at the close of the Sabbath, and dropping a day begins the Sabbath again. This difficulty can be easily avoided from the fact that a person is not obliged to change his day immediately on crossing the line. It will be sufficient for all practical purposes if he makes the change somewhere before reaching land, or before meeting a passing ship.

While some definite line must be fixed so that permanent locations on either side of the line may have a uniform reckoning, a person on the water need not be governed absolutely by this, if it is going to make confusion in his observance of the Sabbath. He can delay the change, on the one hand, until after he has observed the Sabbath, and on the other, until the day that he should drop would not be the Sabbath, but some other day of the week. Thus no man in traveling is under the necessity of either keeping two Sabbaths together, or of going two weeks without any.

In the islands of the Pacific, where permanent settlements are formed, their reckoning should be determined according to their position in reference to the day line. If they are east of that line, they should take their time from America; if they are west of it, they should make their reckoning correspond to that of China.