THE NEW YEAR AND THE SABBATH.
By A. Smith
IT is well known, that, according to Roman time, the old year ends on December 31, and immediately the new year is ushered in. It may not be quite so generally understood that it requires just twenty-four hours to establish the new year all over the earth. Commencing at about the 180th meridian in the Pacific Ocean, at 12 o’clock, midnight, that time is carried westward around the earth to the starting-point at the rate of fifteen degrees an hour; all points east of the moving line being January 1, and all west of it being December 31, until it reaches 180° west longitude, where it will meet the midnight of January 2. Notwithstanding the apparent difficulty involved in the case on account of the rotundity of the earth, there is probably never any complaint made of any difficulty whatever in determining the time when the old year should end and the new year commence. The writer never knew a person to refuse to sit down to a dinner of roast turkey and plum-pudding on New Year’s Day just because the earth was so round that the celebration could not be observed all over the world at the same moment of time. But when the observance of the Sabbath of the Fourth Commandment is urged upon the people as an obligation, professed ministers of the Gospel, who are supposed to be men of erudition and piety, will urge the rotundity of the earth as an insurmountable obstacle to the keeping of that day. The only reason why the Sabbath of the Fourth Commandment can not be as easily observed on a round world as the feast of the New Year, may be briefly expressed in the phrase, “Don’t want to.” When people will yield with evident interest to the custom of gratifying appetite on certain feast days, but oppose every possible argument to the sanctification of the Sabbath, is not their interest in the god whom they serve made apparent by the violation?