"ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE SABBATH."
By Editor
THE discourse of the Rev. Dr. Smith upon this subject, in the Jane-st. Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, on the 13th inst., was one of those specimens of theological charlatanry, of which there have been oft repeated exhibitions for the last three hundred years. We say this without the least disposition to impeach his sincerity; on the contrary, we suppose he meant well, and it is quite likely, that he thought he had made himself master of the subject. It is a pity, however, that men of good intentions and respectable talents should be so blind to the irreconcilable contradictions of their own system. Full half of the discourse was occupied in refuting the argument of Paley, that the Sabbath was first instituted, not in Paradise, but in the Wilderness of Sin. Ex. 16. It was well to take some notice of the argument, perhaps, but we thought that the speaker spent entirely too much time upon it. We judge that some of his sleepy hearers thought so too. Paley's argument serves to prop a falling creed, but it has a very slight hold upon the convictions of sober, common-sense people. The plain, unsophisticated reader, finding it written, "God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it," naturally concludes that these words mean something; he believes the meaning to be, that God set apart the day for a holy use, and rendered it a day peculiarly happy for man. For it were contrary to all reason to suppose, that God proposed to render homage to himself, or to bless himself. And though Paley argue, that God's resting on the seventh day, at the close of creation, was the reason why he blessed and sanctified it for the Israelites in the wilderness, a man of common sense cannot very well understand why that reason was not just as good in the beginning, as it was twenty-five hundred years afterward. Paley's argument is as flimsy as a cobweb, and finds no response in the conscience of a God-fearing man. After disposing of Paley, and glancing at the scriptural allusions to the Sabbath in the Patriarchal Age, the lecturer dwelt upon the institution as embodied in the Jewish Dispensation. He brought it down to the Christian Era, and showed that our Saviour himself honored the institution, holding him up in this respect (so we thought) as an example for his followers. But lo! a new tack is suddenly taken. His followers, instead of imitating his example, are found, immediately after his resurrection, in the observance of the first day of the week! And, according to the lecturer, they continued to do so from that time onward. One would have supposed, from his statements that the observance of the seventh day became suddenly obsolete, and that the numerous references to it as the Sabbath, in Acts of Apostles, (Chaps. xiii. 14, 27, 42, 44; xvi, 13; xvii, 2; xviii, 4,) meant nothing at all. True, the lecturer spoke of the first day of the week as if it were identical with the old Sabbath, differing from it only in a small circumstance; but, in so doing, he not only placed himself at variance with truth, and with all just rules of logic, but appropriated to the first day of the week a name which the above-mentioned passages uniformly appropriate to the seventh. Does open, honest-faced truth, require such craftiness? If the references in the Book of Acts to the Sabbath are to the day which had always been observed as such, then Sabbath is the inspired name given to the seventh day of the week, notwithstanding the resurrection is past. And when man robs the seventh day of this inspired name, and appropriates it to another day, he exhibits a presumption which deserves rebuke. The advocates of Sunday sanctification, however, dare not conform their language to the inspired pattern; it would be fatal to their cause. Had they never given the name Sabbath to the first day of the week, the Sunday observance would not now be any more strict in Great Britain and America, than it is in the most purely Catholic countries. Had they always given it to the seventh day according to the Scripture pattern, there would be twenty Sabbatarians where there is now one. We repeat it, they dare not conform their language to the Scriptures. All their hope of success rests upon keeping up the cheat that the190designation of Sunday as the Sabbath rests upon inspired authority. They dare not tell the people to the contrary. But why did not the Rev. Doctor tell his auditors something about the observance of the seventh day of the week by Christians? Can he who undertook to give the "Origin and History of the Sabbath," be ignorant of the fact, that Christians did observe the seventh day, even for hundreds of years after the Lord's resurrection? He was very careful to give as copious quotations from the old Fathers as possible, showing that Sunday had obtained an honorable distinction among their Church Festivals—a thing that no well-informed person disputes—but the quotations that might have been made in behalf of the Sabbath were wisely let alone. Well, we trust the day will come when the teachers of the people will be willing to look at both sides of the question. The next lecture of the course, as given in the programme which we published last week, will be "The Jewish and Christian Sabbath," by the Rev. Dr. Potts. It will have been delivered before our paper goes to press, but we shall not be able to furnish any notice of it this week. We intend to hear it, if possible.—Sabbath Recorder.