JEWISH SUNDAY?

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 21, 1881

WE often hear the seventh day reviled as the “Jewish Sabbath,” but in an article in the Golden Censer we find the following words:—

“Saturday night should be preparative. ‘To-morrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath.’ On Saturday the Israelites in the wilderness gathered twice the usual amount of manna. Thus they had a sufficiency for the Sabbath. No manna fell on that day, God rested from giving it.”

If they gathered a double quantity on Saturday, they must have rested on Sunday, and therefore it is the Jewish Sunday after all!

We think the article was not original in the Censer, but there is a responsibility resting on religious journals especially to not publish that which misleads the minds of the readers. There is altogether too much of this confusion of terms allowed among religious writers, to strengthen popular errors, especially when the error has no plain, positive proof to sustain it. We have before seen the same statement made, and by the very men who said of those who kept the seventh day or Saturday, that they kept the Jewish Sabbath; and further claimed that the Sabbath was changed from Saturday to Sunday by Christ or his apostles. The truth is, that nobody believes that the Jews gathered a double portion of manna on Saturday, preparatory to their resting on Sunday. Why, then, try to indoctrinate the young and unthinking by statements which everybody knows are contrary to truth and facts? Can anybody expect to be accepted of a righteous God by pursuing a course so questionable? We would that all “pious frauds” were left to the Romish church.