INDIVIDUAL DISCRETION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Aug 30, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 35.

INDIVIDUAL DISCRETION.

"If any discretion at all is to be allowed the individual, it is hard to see who should limit the amount of his discretion except himself," says the Charleston, S. C., News and Courier, concerning Sabbath-breaking. In a recent editorial it notes that "a correspondent of a New York newspaper has stirred up some controversy in that city by roundly condemning Sunday excursions," and quotes from him a statement, and "a logical but radical inquiry" as follows:

It certainly must be conceded that the teaching of the Fourth Commandment is increasingly disregarded, and unless the tendency is checked the Sabbath will be practically dispensed with. If the Fourth Commandment is not binding, why are the other nine of the Decalogue that are the basis of the civil law in the Christian world?

To this the News and Courier adds:

After all is said, we will venture to say there can not be found in the city of New York a single Christian minister who practises or preaches the observance of Sunday according to a literal interpretation of the language of the divine mandate. There is not one of them who does not "break the Sabbath" persistently and in a variety of ways year in and year out. Some follow the instructions of the Fourth Commandment more closely than others, but they are all transgressors, the difference between them being merely a matter of degree. If any discretion at all is to be allowed to the individual it is hard to see who should limit the amount of his discretion except himself. What may be Sabbath observance in one man would be Sabbath-breaking in another. It is universally conceded that the world and humanity are better for the existence of a day of rest, but the strict constructionists of what this phrase does and should mean have no ground upon which to stand so long as they presume to depart one hair's breadth from the letter of the instructions which they profess to have received. The question is, of course, an old and a very much vexed one, and we have no desire to enter into an extended consideration of it, but we have small patience with those who, while professing to enforce observance of a sacred command, do no more than seek to regulate the manner and degree of violations of it.

And the News and Courier's point is still more forcible when we take into consideration that the clergymen who are continually demanding the observance of the Fourth Commandment are not only standing for various degrees of violation of it as regards the manner of Sabbath observance, but are standing for an entire disregard and violation of it as regards the Sabbath day. "A literal interpretation of the language of the divine mandate" affords no ground whatever for Sunday observance, and shows that it commands the observance of another day than that which these advocates of the observance of the Fourth Commandment so persistently press upon the people upon its authority. If these people who so stoutly demand the observance of the Fourth Commandment fail to conform to it either as regards the manner of Sabbath observance or the day to be observed, little attention should be paid to their demand. Let them observe the commandment to the letter, or else let them cease from the presumption of arraigning other people for alleged violation of it.