A CORRESPONDENT in Victoria, Australia (H. M.), inquires, with reference to the keeping of the Sabbath, "Where is the first and true meridian?"
Our querist refers to Mount Sinai; but the Sabbath did not begin at Mount Sinai; it began at creation, in Eden. Where was that?—We do not know. There are divers who endeavor to locate it; some at the North Pole; other some near Mount Ararat. These last try to make the Euphrates, Tigris, Indus, etc., answer to the four rivers of Genesis 2. But this we do know by the Word of God, that while "the earth abideth forever," "the world that then was [before the Deluge], being overflowed with water, perished." 2 Peter 3 : 5, 6. The word from which "world" is translated is cosmos, meaning "order, arrangement." The order, the arrangement, of land and water existing before the flood, perished; it existed no more. Since the flood we have the present general arrangement. The rivers did not flow then as now. Noah kept the Sabbath through the Deluge in the ark. When he came out, he continued it as he came to it. He may have known nothing about meridians. A vast majority of his descendants who have kept the day acceptably to God have known naught of meridians, or Greenwich, or astronomical time; but they did know the Sabbath and kept it. Noah's descendants scattered in all directions, Noah, tradition tells us, going eastward to Eastern Asia and its adjacent islands, carrying the same Sabbath with him as was kept by the Shemites. The Eastern Continent was a unit on the day, so far as they were loyal to God. The migrators westward took the same Sabbath with them to Europe, and across the Atlantic to America. And not until the Pacific is reached, the great waterway which divides the continents, and which in God's providence was not crossed till the world was established in the original week, does any question arise. And that question is answered by the logic of existing facts, with a few exceptions, made by man's blunders. Where does the day begin?—On the eastern shore of the Eastern Continent, reckoning as a part of the continent the islands naturally reached from its shores. Over this there has been no question as regards Sunday, nor would there have been any if all would consent to observe the pagan counterfeit. The question has been raised by Satan to becloud the minds of the honest who desire to know and do the truth.
