A Great Calamity by W. N. G.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, Cal. · Nov 12, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 45.

A Great Calamity.

By W. N. G.

The Christian Register suggests that there could not be "a greater calamity to the Christian world than unity, in the meaning almost uniformly implied." This is very truth; while the Lord's most earnest desire for his people is "that they may be one," he means that they may be one in him, not in some man-made scheme.

Of all the efforts at so-called Christian union, we have seen practical unity on but one point, namely enforced Sunday observance. All the nominal Protestant denominations (excepting those which observe the seventh day) and the Catholic Church are practically united on this question. True, the Catholics formally hold back, preferring that the Protestants would come all the way, and accomplish the work in the main by themselves. Of course the Catholics want to see such a work accomplished, but they want to see it done by the Protestants; for the reason that the Sunday sabbath is a Roman institution, and when the Protestants shall have forced the government to compel its observance, they will have yielded up their Protestant principle of liberty of conscience. Such a union with Catholicism on the part of Protestants is to give away their whole Protestant cause.

They have already compelled the government to legally recognize the day, but not yet to generally enforce its observance under penalty. It has for some time been noticeable that interdenominational conclaves for the furtherance of Sunday ordinances allude to the work as evidence of Christian unity. And in most cases they are satisfied with such a degree of union, for the reason that they all can come to that point without yielding any of their factional dogmas. This is a kind of common platform on which all first-day nominal Protestants can stand, and, standing there, they imagine that they have Christian union because they are all together. On this platform, too, they can walk right over to the Roman parlor, be cordially greeted, and imagine that Romanism is becoming liberalized under the influence of Protestantism.

But this very dogma, Sunday observance by civil law, was the door that opened to the way which led down to the Dark Ages. When the way is once opened to the compulsory observance of religious doctrine, the more "unity" we have to that end the greater the "calamity." W. N. G.