Keep It before the People.
By Uriah Smith
IN a ponderous volume of twelve pamphlet pages, a certain writer essayed to settle the great question of the Sabbath; and some of the assertions which he summoned to his aid in the effort were truly astonishing. He said:— "So much has been written and said about the seventh day of the week that one would naturally suppose the Bible to be full of lessons about it; and yet there is not a word said in the Scriptures about the seventh day of the week."
Because those particular words, "of the week," do not occur, to deny that the week is meant, is to show one's self ready to resort to tricks in argument of which a third-rate pettifogger would be ashamed. A moment's thought shows that the week must be intended. Thus, when God set apart the seventh day, he did not set it apart for himself, but for man, for whom the Sabbath was made. And he did not set apart that first seventh day which was past, but his blessing and sanctification pertained to the seventh day for time to come. Thus, then, it was ordained that men should devote to religious uses every seventh day from that time forward. No one can fail to see that as soon as this arrangement was entered into, the week was an established fact, and followed as inevitably as day and night follow the revolution of the earth upon its axis. All coming days were at once set apart in divisions of sevens; for when the next seventh day arrived after the one upon which God rested, it was to be observed in rest. Then the count must begin again; for the next seventh day was to be kept in like manner; and that being past, a new week must begin with a new count. And so on to the end. Thus the week of necessity existed as soon as the Sabbath was instituted and as evidently it owes its existence to that institution. And the seventh day of each of these weekly periods was the Sabbath; and when the word of God says the seventh day, without qualification, it means, and can mean, nothing else but this. "We find no command for, or example of, the observance of any day recorded in the Bible, prior to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt."
This man has been told better than this, and has no excuse for such an assertion. For any man of honest mind and sincere spirit, it is enough to find plain evidence that a command was given, though the express words of the command are not recorded. And it is positively stated in the record that such command was given to Adam. This is what we want kept before the people: There was a Sabbath commanded in the world, from the lips of God himself, binding upon all his people, for more than twenty-five hundred years before Sinai. People may dispute this point as much as they please, and170ministers may profess a sanctimonious ignorance of it, but there is the record in unequivocal terms. It says that in the beginning God sanctified the day. To sanctify, means to set apart to a religious use. Now will some of those who deny that there was any command for the Sabbath before the exode, tell us how this was done? How was the Sabbath set apart in the beginning to a religious use? They know that this involves a command for its observance; that the sanctification of it was a command for the keeping of it, nothing more nor less. It could not possibly have been anything else. Whoever denies this, takes upon himself the disgrace of insulting truth and common sense. Here while yet the whole race stood in their representatives, Adam and Eve, and sin had not entered the world, the Sabbath was given to man, and with the institution a command to enforce and regulate its observance, in all places, through all time. Yet ministers, without trembling at their own dishonesty, or blushing at their ignorance, will deliberately affirm that there was no command for the Sabbath till it was given from Sinai. Keep it before the people. Let them become so fully informed in regard to this matter that all attempts to use this old misrepresentation will be nullified and spoiled. U. S.