Let Us Suppose It by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 28, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 21.

Let Us Suppose It

By Editor

DR. GEORGE W. GRANNIS, secretary of the Lord's Day Alliance, said in a speech in San Jose February 14:

"Suppose we succeed to the utmost limit of our desire in everything else we are attempting to do, and then wake up to the realization that the greed for gain, the desire for sports, and the love of pleasure, take from us what little of the Lord's day [Sunday] remains; how are we going to hold anything that we have achieved? It is absolutely essential for everything for which the church stands. Man must first of all have a day for worship, a day for rest, a day of freedom from the ordinary grind of daily toil."

Now if Dr. Grannis's argument amounts to anything, it means that we will lose all that we have gained in Christianity unless the Sunday is preserved. It is not mere freedom from toil that he asks; it is not a holiday that he is demanding. It is a day of worship recognized in the law as such. There are many who prefer to attend some sport, as baseball, on that day, and find in it recreation. There are many that seek the pleasure of the woods and the groves and the streams and the mountains, and find in that the keenest zest and recreation. But that in no wise would help the worship day which Dr. Grannis demands. If there is anything to his logic at all, of the preservation of a holy day by law, it must be by a law that will, just as far as humanity can compel, coerce humanity into the appearance of observing the day as a sacred day. But that is utterly impossible, in the very nature of the case. Men may be compelled to stop work on that day, they may even be compelled to attend church; but no man can be compelled to worship or to love the day. That must be voluntary, and of God; and a law compelling men to do what they do not wish to do is a law that will carry them farther away from Christianity than they were. Every attempt to secure a proper Sabbath observance by human law has proved ineffectual, and ever will. The Pharisaic observance of the Sabbath is condemned in the Bible. The worship of God is always voluntary.