Question Corner by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 19, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 37.

Question Corner

By Editor

"IF YE WILL INQUIRE, INQUIRE YE."

This Inquirers' Department is conducted for the purpose of helping those who are studying the Bible. The answers are oftentimes only suggestive. They are never to be considered infallible, only as they agree with the infallible Word. The writer who may answer them does not consider that his opinion is infallible. He will simply give the best that he has, and plead with the inquirer to search the Word. Such questions only will be answered as, to the editors, seem to minister to the good of the readers and to the mission of the paper. We can not answer repeatedly in the same volume questions upon the same scripture. The name and address must accompany question, not for publication, but as an evidence of good faith, and that answer may be made by letter if deemed advisable. No letters are answered which do not contain the name of the writer. It is well always to enclose stamp for reply.

seventh-day Sabbath." Origen, about A.D. 250, in Homily 23, says that "on the Sabbath day all worldly labor ought to be abstained from." Archelaus, 278, bishop of Cascar, in Mesopotamia, in his "Disputation with Manes," says, "As to the assertion that the Sabbath has been abolished, we deny that He has abolished it plainly; for He was Himself also Lord of the Sabbath."

The learned Giesler, "Ecclesiastical History," volume 1, chapter 2, section 30, says that "while the Jewish Christians of Palestine retained the whole Mosaic law, and consequently the Jewish festivals, the Gentile Christians observed also the Sabbath and the Passover, with reference to the last scenes of Jesus' life, but without Jewish superstition." Prof. Edward Brerewood, of Gresham College, London, member of the Church of England, in a work entitled "Learned Treatise of the Sabbath," page 77, Oxford, 1631, says: "The Sabbath of the seventh day was religiously observed in the East church three hundred years and more after our Saviour's passion. That church being the great part of Christendom, and having the apostles' doctrine and example to instruct them, would have restrained it if it had been deadly."

And Lyman Coleman ("Ancient Christianity Exemplified") says that "during the early ages of the church it [the Sunday] was never entitled 'the Sabbath,' this word being confined to the seventh day of the week, the Jewish Sabbath, which, as we have already said, continued to be observed for several centuries"—"down even to the fifth century," he tells us elsewhere.

And Peter Heylyn (History of the Sabbath), says, "The Saturday is called among them [the writers of the Christian church] by no other name than that which formerly it had, the 'Sabbath.' So whenever, for a thousand years and upwards, we meet with Sabbatum in any writer of what name soever, it must be understood of no day but Saturday."

Apostasy, however, led away the Christians more and more from the Sabbath of the Lord, and more and more to honor the festival days of the church, the Sunday was not regarded in any sense as the Sabbath. Constantine's Sunday law in 321 was the first law for Sunday on record.

The Lord's disciples did not sin in picking grain, or shelling out wheat and eating it, as they were passing through the wheat-field on Sabbath. They were simply performing works of necessity, really eating their own dinner from the wheat which they shelled out.

Schedule for Week Ending September 30, 1911