SUNDAY-LAW DISCUSSION IN PITTSBURG.
A NUMBER of articles have recently appeared in the daily journals of Pittsburg, Pa., in agitation of enforced Sunday observance. In support of the Sunday institution, Dr. Wylie, associate editor of the Christian Statesman, submits, among other testimony, that of Augustine, in which he declares that "the holy doctors of the church enjoined that all the glory of the Jewish Sabbath should be transferred to the Lord's day, so that what they celebrated in figure we should celebrate in reality, abstaining from all agricultural work and from all business, that we may be at liberty for divine service alone." Thus the advocates of Sunday laws feel the necessity of appealing to human authority, an authority that assumed to call a day the Lord's day which the Lord never so designated or recognized. And it is pertinent to note that the "holy doctors" referred to "enjoined" the transference mentioned during the council at Laodicea, as late as A.D. 364. It is well to remember also that the same council of "holy doctors" took it upon themselves to pronounce anathema upon all who should continue to observe the seventh-day Sabbath, enjoined by the commandment of the Lord, and to excommunicate them from the church. So, citing the authority, and in imitation of the example, of these "holy doctors," the National Reformers of our day would enforce a like injunction upon all people. It is of interest to note that a Jewish Rabbi of Pittsburg manifests a clearer understanding of Christian principle on this subject than the National Reform ministers who have been preaching and writing upon it. From one of a series of lectures by Rabbi J. Leonard Levy, D.D., reported in the Pittsburg Times, we take the following extract: Those who believe in the Sunday laws and those who clamor for their observance, either know or ought to know that Sunday is not the Sabbath, that it was not so regarded by Jesus of Nazareth, nor by the apostles, nor is there any statement in the Scriptures which warrants the transfer of the seventh day Sabbath to the first day of the week. The student of history knows full well that it was not until the time of Constantine, or nearly 300 years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, that the pagan day, "the venerable day of the sun," became established as the basis of the modern "Sun-day." At that time Sunday was a mere heathen holiday, and it has been left to the theologians, acting on human11authority, to gradually transfer the Sabbath idea of the fourth commandment to the pagan and heathen holiday instituted by Constantine the Great. It was but a step from the Lord Apollo's day (as Sunday was originally known), to the Lord's day, as it was only a step from God's Sun's day to God's Son's day. Whatever be the peculiar logic which has established this transfer; whatever be the arguments adduced to warrant the infringement of the fourth commandment; whatever be the special appeal by means of which God's law uttered on Sinai might be changed by the deeds of man, there is no logic and there is no argument and there is no plea in the court of reason which should prevent the human institution of 1794, human, and therefore erring; human, and therefore variable, from being changed to meet the entirely new condition of affairs concerning which the brave ancestors of the American people knew nothing, and about which they could not dream. As a reader of the New Testament, I have been greatly charmed by the picture of the gentle Nazarene going about doing good, healing the sick, curing the blind, lifting the fallen, helping the lame to walk, and I well remember with what a sense of approbation I have always read of His plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath day, and justifying His action by the splendid Jewish saying that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." Were this gentle and loving Jew to come to Allegheny County on a summer's day, and desire to practise His generous art, by the modern method of purchasing ice, forsooth, His followers would cry out against Him and charge Him with breaking the laws of 1794, for doing the very thing they so highly approve when reported in the Scriptures. But this is merely a detail and unworthy of men who are pledged to the high calling of teaching religion. If there be no better way of displaying love for an ennobling faith than to become part and parcel of an inquisitorial system; if there be no better way of proving witnesses to the truth, than by persecuting in a manner (in my judgment contrary to the true intent of the Constitution of this land), those who deal in what we in our day feel to be necessities on Sunday, then wo worth religion, and wo worth the men who thus malign and misrepresent the true principle of religion, and wo worth those shepherds who are the primary cause, through maintaining the blue laws, of forcing many to make Sunday a red-letter day. Let those who agitate for a legal Sunday remember that when it is instituted, they will obtain that which Jesus opposed.