SELECTIONS | AdventAI

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 8, 1858

SELECTIONS.

[From the Sabbath Recorder.]

The Present Sabbath Agitation—Plain Talk.

It is known to most of our readers, that there has been for some time past considerable extra exertion to promote and enforce the more general observance of the first day of the week, commonly called Sunday, and by many called the Christian Sabbath. This movement was sustained by a meeting of one hundred clergymen at the Spingler Institute, and has since been followed up by the preaching of one hundred sermons, and by divers meetings, resolutions, publications, &c., in behalf of the measure. These gentlemen, in setting forth and claiming the religious observance of Sunday as part and parcel of the revealed law and requirement of the Bible, either directly or indirectly, or by implication, are guilty of misrepresentation. It is not credible to suppose that these men, so highly educated and extensively read as many of them are, can be so ignorant of the truth on this question. The conclusion can scarcely be resisted, that many of them knowingly acquiesce in the promulgation of a known error.

These men, when the claims of the Bible Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, are urged upon their attention, dispose of them rather unceremoniously by calling the seventh day the Jewish Sabbath.

The seventh day of the week is the Jewish Sabbath just as much as, and no more than, the Bible account of the creation is a Jewish record—as the books of Moses are Jewish books. ’Tis the Jewish Sabbath just as much as, and no more than—Moses, Joshua and Samuel were Jewish prophets and law-givers—as David was the Jewish Psalmist—as Isaiah, Jeremiah and the other ancient prophets were Jewish prophets—as Jesus Christ was the Jewish Saviour, and the twelve apostles were Jewish apostles. In short, the seventh day of the week is the Jewish Sabbath just as much as the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the Jewish Bible, or as Jehovah or the God revealed in the Bible is the Jewish God. The seventh-day Sabbath is part and parcel of the Bible. Its institution, observance, perpetuation and handing down to the present time is a memorial and monument of the creation and giving of the divine law, which the whole Christian world should tenaciously hold on to as a most precious testimony to the reality of the divine record. The strong tendency of the times is for all these things to loose their hold upon the memory and consideration of the world, and to be merged, obscured and forgotten in the general inundation of material progress, prosperity and change. Let Christians beware that they do not aid this materialistic and atheistic tendency. Sunday observance, on the other hand, is a memorial or monument of the ancient heathen or pagan worship of the sun. It prevailed long before the Christian era. It was brought into the Christian church by the pagan converts. There is not a scrap of a text in the Bible to point out or support it as a Christian Sabbath. Some twenty-five or thirty years since, there was an effort similar to the present to promote and enforce the observance of Sunday. At that time there was a reward offered through the New York papers of five hundred dollars for a single precept in the Bible in favor of the observance of the first day of the week as a Sabbath—five hundred dollars for a single instance where Christ or the apostles called the first day of the week a Sabbath, and five hundred dollars for a single example of their ever having observed the first day of the week as a Sabbath. No one ever came forward to claim the reward, and the agitation in favor of Sunday observance was soon after in a great measure discontinued.