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A SABBATH CONVENTION

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 28, 1878

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 52, No. 22.

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A SABBATH CONVENTION.

[THE following from the Congregationalist of Sept. 25, may be of interest to the readers of the REVIEW. It speaks for itself. G. F. HAINES.]
It has become a question, and an immediate one, whether New England shall not hold a Convention for the rescue of the Lord’s day, all denominations taking part in the movement and being there represented. Will not ministers and laymen let themselves be heard on this question? Associations, conferences, clubs, can do important work for the day, and can especially prepare the way here; but must we not have a Convention? The very agitation of forming one would stir our six States to a new interest in their own Sabbath. Planned rightly, carried out consistently, pertinaciously followed up through a large committee, possibly by a Sabbath organization in counties or towns, the Convention would do a great deal toward setting right our New England, and would arrest the attention of the whole country. Shall it not be held? Are clergymen all aware of what we have already lost—lost beyond an easy recovery? Are church members, good citizens, parents, aware of it? All will say, Few are alive to it.
No two years in the last ten have made such ruin and havoc as the season now closing. And already devices are announced for a bolder, brisker campaign next summer. We are credibly informed that eleven hundred picnickers, with baskets, from Lowell, passed in their long, long train, through the Salem station, on their way to their holiday grounds at Revere, on a single calm morning of the Lord’s day. Salem itself run over, as has been her wont, with her own population and people from the towns around en route for the “Willows,” or other spots, perhaps on an excursion by steamer, or railroad, possibly in carriages for the camp-meeting grounds in Hamilton. Which shall we ask first? Where are the consciences of the lovers of pleasure? or, where are the consciences of the managers of railroads and of the owners of steamers?
Sacredly and solemnly, if the views and convictions of large-minded living men, and of the best men we have had in all times past, as to the appointment, meaning, uses, and value of the Lord’s day are not to be thrown away, how can New England answer to herself, and to the God of our fathers, for what she has done, or so quietly accepts?