THE TWO HEMISPHERES AND THE SABBATH.—NO. 1.
By W. H. Littlejohn
BY ELD. W. H. LITTLEJOHN. Among the objections commonly presented to the keeping of the definite seventh day of the week as the Sabbath of the Lord, is one which has for its basis the facts that the earth is round and revolves on its axis, thus rendering the identification of the day impossible in any given locality. It would be difficult to determine where the effects of this doctrine would end, if it could be substantiated. Those who employ it generally do so because it furnishes a convenient retreat when they find themselves unable to answer the cogent arguments which are brought from the word of God to prove that the Sabbath of the commandment is a particular day of the week. They seem to have failed utterly in discovering, first, that the logic which they employ is just as fatal to the Sunday as it is to the Sabbath; secondly, that unless they can first show that the letter of the law is susceptible of the latitudinarian construction which they place upon it, they have unwittingly impeached the God of Heaven by proving that he was ignorant of the rotundity and revolution of the earth on its axis; or, thirdly, that the Bible never emanated from him, and, consequently, that there is now no Sabbath at all. Yet these three conclusions are as inevitably drawn from their position as is the law of gravitation from the fact that a substance thrown into the air always returns to the earth again. A word will demonstrate the truthfulness of this statement. Nay, it is too plain to require demonstration; for at a glance we can perceive— 1. That if you cannot find when Saturday will be reached in a given locality, it will be equally impossible to find when Sunday will dawn upon the same region. Both are alike days; they stand in juxtaposition to each other, the one always preceding, and the other always following, and, therefore, they are so inseparably connected that if you can find the one you can also find the other. That is, if you can find the Sunday, or first day of the week, you know that Saturday, or the last day of the previous week, was the day which just preceded it; the converse being also true that if you cannot find the Saturday it would be equally impossible to find the Sunday. 2. If the Sabbath law is so worded, and if the circumstances attending its proclamation were of such a nature, as to force upon the mind of the candid investigator the conviction that its terms, fairly construed, require the observance of a particular day in all parts of the world, whereas reason and science unite in proving that such a requirement could not be carried out because of the peculiar constitution of the earth itself, then, as God himself wrote the law with his own finger, he either deliberately required men to perform an impossibility, or else he blundered egregiously because he knew less about natural law and the diurnal motion of the earth than does the veriest tyro of the present day. The first of these conclusions would prove God to be a tyrant, and the second would prove him to be grossly ignorant of facts now known to every school-boy. But tyranny and ignorance are alike incompatible with any just conceptions of the character of the Deity. To prove, therefore, (as these men would do) that the Author of the Sabbath law was either tyrannical or ignorant, would be to prove that he was not the God of Heaven. 3. The only escape from the impeachment of the God of nature spoken of under the preceding number, would be found in an utter repudiation of the Scriptures on the ground that they never emanated from him, as proved by the fact that from the standpoint occupied by these individuals they would represent him to be grossly deficient in either virtue or wisdom. When this point shall have been reached, however, we shall be left without any Sabbath whatever, since the only authority which the Sabbath can claim is found in the sacred writings which will have been disposed of in this summary manner. In view of these considerations, it becomes a matter of no small moment that Christians should move with care and caution in the use of arguments which might be turned with such destructive effects against the whole system of our divine religion. Even should they find it somewhat difficult from the scientific standpoint to remove all the objections to the definite Sabbath day which are physical in their character and origin, it would be better for them to suspend judgment for a time in order to the acquisition of further light, than it would to hastily adopt a theory which would undermine the very foundations of our faith. Should they do otherwise, and persist in following the line of argument which we deprecate, they might gain a temporary advantage in debate; but the price which they would pay for it would be larger than either they or the race could afford to give. They might be able to perplex and bewilder by their scientific speculation the humble individual who should insist that the keeping of the first day of the week would not answer the demands of a law which required in express terms the hallowing of the seventh day; but the moment that they should succeed in establishing their lax conceptions of the statute, that moment they would have inaugurated a construction which takes from the Sunday all its claims for special commemoration. In other words, they would have established the seventh-part-of-time theory; i. e., they would have proved that no definite day can be kept the world around, and, as a consequence, that individuals were designedly left by the Author of the law to select for themselves the day which they will hallow. This being true, either Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, or any other day of the week, may be selected with perfect propriety by individuals or communities as the day of their worship, and no earthly power could call their action in question. The result which would follow from the exercise of such a right is at once apparent. Confusion the most utter and deplorable would inevitably ensue. The Sabbath, which was designed to be a blessing, would immediately become a curse under this theory of its nature and obligation. When put in operation, the State and the church would alike perish; for the former could not exist without courts, legislative bodies, and schools; and neither of these could be successfully administered while legislators, judges, jurors, clients, witnesses, teachers, and scholars, were allowed to select, according to the caprice of each, the day which they individually would celebrate. The latter also could not continue in its collective capacity for any length of time, since its existence depends so largely upon general union in Sabbath worship that, without it, it would cease to be. Should it be replied that each State could regulate this for itself, and would be led to do so by the dictates of self-interest, we reply, first, this would relieve the situation somewhat; but as states which possess a complete autonomy of their own lie in close proximity to others equally well supplied for the work of self-government, confusion would necessarily arise in the mutual business intercourse of their citizens unless all should unite in enforcing the observance of the same day of rest; and, therefore, that the only perfect system of regulation upon this subject would be one which would give to the world at large the same Sabbath day. Secondly, that should we grant—as we do most cheerfully—the existence of a social necessity for a uniform Sabbath of strength so great as to exert a powerful influence upon States and princes in the direction of conformity in the matter in question, then we have found a strongly presumptive argument that the law of God—which undertook to make a Sabbath for mankind—has met the requirements of the case in providing just such a Sabbath as they need. In other words, that it has furnished a Sabbath which men in different parts of the world can celebrate on the same day of the week. In order, therefore, to decide this question, whether the God of Heaven has displayed that wisdom which should characterize a being of his attributes in providing a Sabbath which accords in every respect alike with the highest good of society and the laws of nature, let us examine the following points: 1. Does the fourth commandment require the commemoration of a definite day of the week? 2. Can such a day be celebrated the world around? We think that a very few considerations can be offered which are of such a nature as to furnish a satisfactory answer to the first of these queries. As the more natural and direct source of information, we appeal to the statute itself. Its phraseology is simple and explicit. Not only does it enforce the commemoration of a Sabbath, but it also particularizes so far as to make mention of the fact that the one to be kept was the one known as the Sabbath of the Lord. If, therefore, we can determine when that occurs, we shall be able to decide what our duty will be. In this matter, however, we shall experience no difficulty. Thirty days previous to the promulgation of the commandment, Moses, from the standpoint of the sixth day of the week, said to the people, “To-morrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord.” Such a declaration was definitive in its character, and located beyond all question the Sabbath of the Lord as the day which follows the sixth day of the week, and, therefore, as the seventh or last of that cycle. The commandment, enforcing the same obligation which Moses sought to inculcate, employs the same title, i. e., the Sabbath of the Lord thy God, as well as the secular one employed by him, namely, the seventh day. In doing so, the identification of the day to which both Moses and Jehovah alluded is settled beyond controversy. But the Sabbath law, as if to be even more explicit in particularizing the day which it commanded to be observed, still further identified it by declaring that it is the one upon which God “rested,” and which he also “blessed and hallowed.” In furnishing this statement it establishes two facts: 1. That we are to keep the Sabbath of the Lord; 2. That when we find it, we shall be able to recognize its true character in the facts that God rested upon, blessed, and hallowed it. The conclusion, therefore, is unavoidable that we can meet the requirements of the fourth commandment only by setting apart to the purposes of rest and worship a period of time of which all the facts predicated of the Sabbath of the Lord will be true. Proceeding now in our search for hallowed time, we inquire, first, Will Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday meet the demands of the case? The answer, obviously, must be in the negative. Neither one of them can be said to be the Sabbath of the Lord, because it is not nor ever was true of either of them that God ever rested upon, blessed, or hallowed it. Advancing, therefore, in our search, we scrutinize closely the claims of the seventh or last day of the week, which is Saturday; and we immediately discover that the result of our investigation is to be very different from what it was in the former cases; for by turning to the first, second, and third verses of the second chapter of Genesis, we may learn that God, having completed the work of creation, rested on the seventh day, and blessed and sanctified it, because that in it he had rested from all his work. As a result of this discovery, we are forced to the conclusion that this day, and this alone, is the one which will meet the demands of the law; since it is the only one which can justly lay claim to the honor which belongs to the Sabbath of the Lord. Without pausing to elaborate more fully an argument which seems at once to be both simple and conclusive, we pass from the consideration of the subject from the standpoint of God’s word to that of his providence.