BUT WHY NOT STICK TO THE WORD?
The Pulpit of the Cross, a “High Church” paper, published at Omaha, Neb., in its issue of August 28, in its leading editorial article, answers a correspondent who objects to “Fasting Communion,” that is, partaking of the consecrated elements before eating on that day, on the ground that it is not Scriptural, that there is nothing in the Bible to sustain it. As a part of the reply to this correspondent the Pulpit of the Cross presents the following:— But our critic has accused us of “strange inconsistency.” We wonder if he himself is so inconsistent as to observe the ancient custom of keeping holy the first day of the week instead of the seventh? What authority, we should like to know, can he find in the Holy Scriptures for observing Sunday instead of Saturday as his Sabbath? There is not one-half as much in the New Testament to justify a Sunday Sabbath as there is to justify Fasting Communion. On the subject of this great change, the Scriptures are entirely silent. If in the matter of the Sabbath we have nothing to fall back upon except the Bible, then the argument of the Seventh-day Adventist is well nigh unanswerable. The only valid reason he who charges us with inconsistency can give for keeping holy the first day of the week is the authority of those “ancient customs” which he faults us for reverencing so highly. We keep Sunday as a day of religious rest and worship, because the church has always from the very beginning kept it in honor of CHRIST’s resurrection from the dead. That is the sole and only justification we have for our practise. Therefore unless our anonymous friend is a Seventh-day Adventist he is inconsistent in observing the LORD’s day after the “ancient customs,” while he calls the equally ancient custom of Fasting Communion “disloyalty to CHRIST.” But why not go back to the more ancient custom of the observance of the Sabbath which has the authority of not an apostatizing church, but the Word of God and the example of Jesus Christ?