A Theological Babel

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 25, 1857

A Theological Babel.

WHY is there so much confusion existing among those who are laboring to prove the divinity of Sunday-keeping? They have the same goal to run to; the same object in every case they wish to gain, and the same results to arrive at. Why then do they take such a multitude of ways to reach them?

It is a notorious fact that the views of so-called learned and great men on this subject completely overturn, eat up and annihilate each other. This may easily be seen by comparing their testimony, as has often been done in the REVIEW.

“Her creeds are various as her costly towers.”

Again we ask, Why is it? Is it not because the attempt to remove from its firm pedestal the ancient and magnificent structure of the holy Sabbath which God in the beginning placed thereon, and rear in its stead a superstructure of human invention, without one divine timber to support it;—is it not because this attempt is a work more impious than the efforts of the sons of men anciently to pierce the heavens with their tower on the plains of Shinar? and as then, has not God now branded confusion upon their language.

But the modern Babel-builders are more censurable than their venerable progenitors: of them it is recorded that when their language was confounded, they “left off to build.” And why do not our First-day champions, when they perceive that the arguments by which their cherished theory is supported, are at antipodes with each other, and that they have no more agreement one with another than Christ with Belial, or light with darkness, leave off to build, and abandon their structure to a fate which this very fact plainly proves that it justly merits? We can only ask, Why? for they do not do it.

The ancients then have the advantage of the moderns in this particular: when their language was confounded, they ceased from their abortive labors; but these (though scarce any two of them speak the same thing) who are dabbling with the brick and slime of modern Shinar, persist in their work of confusion with a pertinacity which baffles description.