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GONE, IS IT?

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 30, 1879

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 54, No. 19.

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GONE, IS IT?

There appeared recently in The Christian Union, an article declaring that “the Puritan Sabbath is gone; not threatened, not going, but gone,” and suggesting that the future must give us a modified day of rest regulated by law, in which both laymen and preachers will, without scruple, “read the Sunday paper, ride in the Sunday cars, and trade in the Sunday market.”
A writer in the Advance of Oct. 9, 1879, severely criticises this article in The Christian Union, as a virtual surrender of the whole Sabbath controversy. He also objects to the use of the word “Sunday,” but pleads for the term “Sabbath,” and the maintenance of the Sabbatic institution, of course on the first day of the week. He says:—
“There is nothing in a mere ‘Sunday’ to beget, foster, and spread those influences that afford society and a nation the support and sustenance of the higher social virtues. But in the ‘Sabbath’ there is; . . . a Sabbath originating, not in the Westminster Catechism, but in the Old-Testament Decalogue.”
The utter misapprehension under which men are laboring in reference to the Sabbath question, is here apparent. The thought that the term Sabbath in any wise belongs to Sunday, or that it can be truthfully applied to that day, and that the decalogue can be used to enforce the observance of Sunday as a Sabbath, is one of the fatal weaknesses of the Sunday movement. Many have already learned that this cannot be done; and all will have to learn it. This is the new wine which Nicholas Bound, D. D., tried to pour into the old Sunday bottle in 1595; but it will burst it into shreds, for it has given birth to the inquiry how the fourth commandment can be made to sustain the observance of Sunday, and thus the fatal fallacy of the position is revealed.
We predict that the popular Sabbath of the future will be such an institution as The Christian Union speaks of,—an American Sabbath, not enforced by the Bible, but resting on the sanction of human law.