THE SABBATH ZONE by A. Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 4, 1879

THE SABBATH ZONE.

By A. Smith

WHEN God had created our first parents, he commanded them, as representatives of the human race, to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Wherever the mountain tops lift their pinnacles to the sky, or the vine-clad hills “kiss the face of heaven;” wherever the waters of the sea roll their resistless tides, or the green islands dot the face of the ocean; wherever the desert spreads its broad wastes of sand to the scorching sun, or the fruitful valley burdens the air with the perfume of the mimosa or the rose; even there does the empire of man extend, and the prerogatives and obligations with which he was endowed by the Creator attend him.

Coeval with the investment of authority bestowed by the Creator was the institution of marriage, and that of the weekly Sabbath, designed to be ubiquitous with the extent of man’s empire. The former is honored everywhere by the authority of Scripture, and the latter was declared by the Son of God to have been made for man. Who, then, shall say that the former may be universally practiced, while the latter cannot be so observed because of the supposed difficulty of determining its beginning or close on a round world inclining to the plane of its orbit?

But did not the same difficulty exist at the time of the creation? Yet in that very act, events that affected the whole surface of the earth were limited in their operation to periods called days, marked by the successions of darkness and light created by the diurnal revolutions of the earth.

If the objection to the Bible Sabbath based upon the roundness of the earth be pertinent, leaving out of the question the resultant injustice

of the Creator in scattering mankind over the earth and then requiring them to keep the Sabbath, the Jewish people, to whom the law was directly given, were at fault in obeying the letter of the commandment, as appears from the following considerations.

After they left Sinai, during their journey in the wilderness, they covered an extent of country of about three degrees east and west, representing twelve minutes’ difference in the time of beginning or ending the Sabbath at the setting of the sun. When they had become settled in the Holy Land, a difference of about eight minutes intervened between the times of beginning or ending the Sabbath to the dwellers in the opposite lateral borders of that land, while, by the laws of latitude, allowing for a difference in the length of the day between the northern and southern extremities of Palestine, the inhabitants of Riblah began or ended the Sabbath about half an hour earlier than those of Gaza. Will our objectors tell us which observed the Sabbath according to the commandment, or was it impossible for either to do so?

During the Babylonish captivity some of the Jews dwelt in Palestine, and others in Egypt. To those in Babylon the Sabbath began more than an hour earlier than it did to their brethren in Memphis. Did the captive Israelites take the Sabbath with them to Babylon, and, by so doing, leave the inhabitants of Judea and the land of Ham free from its obligation? Or did they leave it behind them for the impoverished remnant, while they, from the princes in the courts of Babylon and Shushan to the lowest of the people, discarded it altogether for the space of seventy years? Will those who object to the Sabbath on the round-world principle please tell us where on earth it is or ever was possible for man to keep it? Is it upon the meridian of Jerusalem? Then to a man living on the east side of that line the Sabbath would, in point of fact, come earlier by an imperceptible moment of time than to one on the west side, though they lived within sound of each other’s voices. If the observance of the Sabbath is not limited to a single meridian, how wide a zone can be embraced by the Sabbath law? and where in the world is it? Or was there once such a zone, and it afterward, by some collapse of the earth, became extinct?

But the first-day of the week, the so-called Christian Sabbath, is not attended with such difficulties ; sweetly it steals upon the slumbering inhabitants of the land, at the midnight hour, just where it was placed by pagan Rome; the earth suddenly becomes flat, and the denizens of the tropics, of Rome, and Uppernavik, and those who bivouac at the poles of the earth, awaken in the morning from their protracted slumber with the sun shining from an altitude of forty-five degrees.

“Consistency, thou art a jewel.”

A. SMITH.