CALIFORNIA CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE AGAIN.
By Editor
We are very sorry that our hitherto seemingly friendly contemporary in the university town of Berkeley is so deeply stirred, so manifestly tantalized and embittered, so much so, in fact, that it seems willing to make statements that have neither a semblance of truth nor fact in them. For instance, in its issue of January 24, it begins an editorial this way: “The marvelous activity of the Seventh-day Adventists in opposing the enactment of any sort of a Sabbath day is only natural. Their working principle, working contention, is the declaration that Saturday is Sunday.” We want the Advocate to explain that second sentence. Seventh-day Adventists do believe in a Sabbath day, most thoroly; they believe in the Sabbath day instituted of God, commanded of God, and kept by the Lord Jesus Christ. They believe that for the same reason that they believe in Jesus Christ; they get their information and authority from the same Book which tells of Jesus Christ and His salvation. They there read that He is all-sufficient to His church, that all power is His, and that that power is given to His church, and that He would be with her to the end; while, on the other hand, His church should be, not the fulness of the civil law, but the fulness of Him who filleth all in all. Therefore they believe that to ask civil power either to embody in statute law that which He has Himself commanded or to place a substitute in its place is contrary to Christianity. Why should they not be active in opposing such a monstrosity as that? Why should not the Advocate stand with them in this? We have been asked many times by those ignorant of the Bible, “So you believe that Saturday is Sunday do you?” Of course we explain to them just as kindly and simply as we can that such a thing as that is an utter impossibility. No Seventh-day Adventist ever made such a declaration, or ever used it, only as repeating it after some one ignorant of the simple Biblical and historical facts. We are astonished at an intelligent editor of a Christian paper making any such statement as that. Why he should do it is something that we can not understand. Does he regard Sunday as a holy thing? a divine institution apart from any day of the week? Such a declaration could be made sensibly only on such a supposition, but if he has read anything of Seventh-day Adventist literature or claims, he knows that they make no such declarations nor believe any such thing. Saturday is Saturday. Sunday is Sunday. They do not believe Sunday to be the Sabbath, neither do they believe that Saturday, the civil day, is the Sabbath, but that the Bible Sabbath begins just where the Bible places its beginning, at sunset Friday night, and ends at sunset Saturday night; consequently covers a part of two days. Surely, if they supposed that, it would be an absurd supposition, but, dear editor, they suppose no such thing. Again the Advocate declares: “You can not argue with an Adventist. He is impenetrable. It is safe to say that when any person falls into that logical trap he can not be extricated by any process of reasoning.” But if it be “logical” what kind of a process of right arguing would extricate him from it? We have this proposition to make to Dr. Bovard: If he will come down here and visit us, or tell us when we can find him at home, we shall be glad to meet him and argue this question just as kindly and Christianly as it is possible for men to argue, on our side. We are not challenging to a debate. We are willing to do it alone in the privacy of his own office. “If the contention [that is, against Sunday] had any ground in ethics or in propriety or common sense, we might be willing to come to Saturday or Monday, or any day of the week, in order to have one day of rest, but to come to Saturday would be to rehabilitate a sheer mercantile religious despotism.” No, Seventh-day Adventists would not have one single soul come to the seventh day unless he so desires. Above all things else we ask everybody to “be fully persuaded in his own mind.” If it were in our power to compel every soul in California or in this broad earth to keep the seventh day, by the turn of a hand or the signature of a pen, we would not do it. God’s Sabbath can be kept acceptably only by freeborn spirits, and we could not even think of a law compelling seventh-day observance. We would oppose it just as strenuously as we oppose first-day observance. We do not believe in the religious despotism that seeks to bind anybody’s conscience by any laws whatsoever. God’s “law is spiritual,” and only the spiritual can keep it, and no civil enactment whatsoever can in any wise help it or enforce it. It has within it the life of God Himself, and tho all men should rebel against it, yet it will live. Has not the editor a Sunday established in his own heart? Does he need a California law to do that? Is not that true of every one who loves Sunday, and who believes and observes Sunday? Then why a law to compel somebody else to act just as he and his friends are acting when he does not believe it? As regards saloons and race-tracks, gamblers and drunkards, sometime, according to God’s prophecies and in the logic of events, the editor of the Advocate will find himself with all of them, seeking only selfish aims. When the Sunday-law regime gets strong enough they will swing to that side of the question. Just now their desire for freedom is opposition to religious tyranny. But not knowing true Christian liberty the same selfish motive will lead them to the wrong5side of the question, just where the Advocate now stands. We most earnestly hope by that time the editor of the Advocate will see enough of Christ and Christianity in the simple word of God and the power of the Gospel to come over on the right side, even tho he has helped to pass a law to persecute him when he does.