and Protestants on this question, in the following forcible language:—
“I am going to propose a very plain and serious question, to which I would entreat all who profess to follow ‘the Bible, and the Bible only,’ to give their most earnest attention. It is this: Why do you not keep holy the Sabbath day?
“The command of Almighty God stands clearly written in the Bible in these words: ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work.’ Ex. 20:8, 9. Such being God's command, then I ask again, Why do you not obey it? Why do you not keep holy the Sabbath day?
“You will answer me, perhaps, that you do keep holy the Sabbath day; for that you abstain from all worldly business, and diligently go to church, and say your prayers, and read your Bible at home, every Sunday of your lives.
“But Sunday is not the Sabbath day. Sunday is the first day of the week; the Sabbath day was the seventh day of the week. Almighty God did not give a commandment that men should keep holy one day in seven; but he named his own day, and said distinctly, ‘Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day;’ and he assigned a reason for choosing this day rather than any other—a reason which belongs only to the seventh day of the week, and cannot be applied to the rest. He says, ‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.’
“Almighty God ordered that all men should rest from their labor on the seventh day, because he too had rested on that day; he did not rest on Sunday, but on Saturday. On Sunday, which is the first day of the week, he began the work of creation, he did not finish it; it was on Saturday that he ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.’ Gen. 2:2, 3. Nothing can be more plain and easy to be understood than all this; and there is nobody who attempts to deny it; it is acknowledged by everybody that the day which Almighty God appointed to be kept holy was Saturday, not Sunday. Why do you, then, keep holy the Sunday and not the Saturday?
“You tell me that Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, but that the Christian Sabbath has been changed to Sunday. Changed! but by whom? Who has authority to change an express command of Almighty God? When God has spoken and said, Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day, who shall dare to say, Nay, thou mayest work, and do all manner of worldly business on the seventh day; but thou shalt keep holy the first day, in its stead? This is the most important question, which I know not how you can answer.
“You are a Protestant, and you profess to go by the Bible, and the Bible only; and yet in so important a matter as the observance of one day in seven as a holy day, you go against the plain letter of the Bible, and put another day in the place of that day which the Bible has commanded. The command to keep holy the seventh day is one of the ten commandments; you believe that the other nine are still binding; who gave you authority to tamper with the fourth? If you are consistent with your own principles, if you really follow the Bible, and the Bible only, you ought to be able to produce some portion of the New Testament in which this fourth commandment is expressly altered, or, at least, from which you may confidently infer that it was the will of God that Christians should make that change in its observance which you have made.
“The present generation of Protestants keep Sunday holy instead of Saturday, because they received it as a part of the Christian religion from the last generation, and that generation received it from the generation before, and so on, backward, from one generation to another, by a continual succession, until we come to the time of the (so-called) Reformation, when it so happened that those who conducted the change of religion in this country, left this particular portion of the Catholic faith and practice untouched.
“But, had it happened otherwise—had some one or other of the ‘Reformers’ taken it into his head to denounce the observance of Sunday as a popish corruption and superstition, and to insist upon that day was the day which God had appointed to be kept holy, and that he had never authorized the observance of any other—all Protestants would have been obliged, in obedience to their professed principle of following the Bible, and the Bible only, either to acknowledge this teaching as true, and to return to the observance of the ancient Sabbath, or else to deny that there is any Sabbath at all. And so, in like manner, any one at the present day who should set about, honestly and without prejudice, to draw up for himself a form of religious belief and practice out of the written word of God, must needs come to the same conclusion; he must either believe that the Sabbath is still binding upon men's consciences because of the Divine command, ‘Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day;’ or he must believe that no Sabbath at all is binding upon them, because of the apostolic injunction, ‘Let no man judge you in respect to a festival day, or of the sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ's. Either one or the other of these conclusions he might honestly come to; but he would know nothing whatever of a Christian Sabbath, distinct from the ancient, celebrated on a different day, and observed in a different manner, simply because holy Scripture itself nowhere speaks of such a thing.
“Now mind, in all this, you would greatly misunder-