IT CANNOT BE CONCEALED by Joseph Harvey Waggoner

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 20, 1878

IT CANNOT BE CONCEALED.

By Joseph Harvey Waggoner

The Christian Worker is the name of a small paper now published in Springfield, Ohio. The editor is an earnest worker for the Sunday-school cause. From it I take the following:—

“Sunday is of heathen origin. ‘So called because this day was anciently dedicated to the sun, or to its worship.’—Webster.

“We do not exactly see the fitness of things in Christians’ calling their day of religious worship after a heathen god. It would be much more in character to have the name represent the Christian’s God. Why not call and spell it SON-DAY?”

We can see a remarkable fitness in thus letting the name publish to the world the “heathen origin” of the institution. All efforts to conceal this fact must fail. History is too positive in its statements, and too well established throughout the world, to suffer the title of “the venerable day of the sun” to be lost sight of at this day. Any effort to cover up the truth on this point is only a further notification to the world that such a truth exists.

All history points to the decree of Constantine as the first authority for resting from work on the first day of the week. He called it, in that decree, “the venerable day of the sun.” And this order to rest extended only to the towns and cities. Dr. Schaff, in his History of the Church, speaking of Constantine, said he “enjoined the civil observance of Sunday, though not as dies Domini [Lord’s day], but as dies solis [sun’s day], in conformity to his worship of Apollo”—the sun-god. See this and other quotations to like effect in the Review of Baird’s Sermons.

Note the difference. Those who obey God in his fourth commandment, and “call the Sabbath a delight,” are constantly pointing the world to the divine origin of the Sabbath, while the advocates of Sunday are endeavoring to pervert the facts of history in order to conceal the “heathen origin” of the day of popular favor. It is too late. Sunday—“sacred to the sun”—made so by pagan idolators. What a shame to the professed Christian world, to thus follow “the ways of the heathen.” Jer. 10.

J. H. Waggoner.

Sandusky, O., June 10.