SUNDAY-SABBATH CONVENTION.
By Roswell F. Cottrell
We do not write to announce such convention, with time and place, but to suggest that our first-day friends ought to hold one, in order to agree on some line of argument by which to sustain their favorite institution in its tottering condition, so that the confusion existing upon this subject may be remedied, and all be in harmony in giving the reasons of the faith and hope and practice in which they mutually delight. Those who discontinue the Sabbath of the decalogue, and substitute for it the first day of the week, should be able to sustain their views with a united voice. But how is it? One tells us that the whole law “written and engraven in stones” has been abolished; another, that that form of it has been abrogated; another, that the Sabbath only of that law has been done away; another, that the Sabbath of the fourth commandment is universal and perpetual, but the day of the Sabbath has been changed, so that they truly keep it by rest and worship on another day; another, that any one day of rest after six of labor is all that the commandment requires, so that any day we choose is truly the Sabbath of the law of God; another, that every day should be kept holy in this dispensation, there being no distinction of days. And besides all this, most of them claim that time has been lost so that we cannot tell which is the seventh day; that is, that it is impossible to keep a particular day on a round and rolling world. Still they are all agreed that the definite first day of the week, the day on which Christ arose from the dead, should be kept by all in all parts of the world. And these various, conflicting, and contradictory positions are not only held by different individuals, but the same individual will hold nearly all of them, and will set them forth, one after another, in the same discourse. They will tell us that Christ and his apostles changed the Sabbath of the fourth commandment from the seventh to the first day of the week; but not finding any evidence to sustain this assertion, they will claim that any one day of the seven is all that the commandment requires. If this is true, a change of the day is impossible. But these two contradictory arguments not being of sufficient strength to answer their purpose, they present another, and that is, the commandment has been abolished, at least that form of it, and its Sabbath taken out of the way, being nailed to the cross. This leaves us without a commandment and without a Sabbath; for the commandment has not been renewed. Their arguments naturally remind us of those of the young lawyer in a suit brought against his client for breaking a borrowed kettle. Said he, in summing up, “Please the court, we claim to have proved, 1. That the kettle was cracked when my client borrowed it; 2. That it was whole when he returned it; and 3. That he never borrowed the kettle.” Truth never stands in need of such absurd and contradictory arguments. They are unworthy of a person of candor and sense, a disgrace to a professor of the religion of Christ; what then shall we say of them coming from the mouth of a pious and learned minister? We have no reason to believe that the proposed convention will be held. If it should, they cannot agree with one another; and besides this, no one would agree with himself.