Sunday a Corner Stone of the American National Edifice.
By J. DORCAS.
In viewing the present state of the world, and comparing it with the Bible description of the last days, it strikes me forcibly that Babylon the great will soon be divided into three grand parts. God's people will be called out by the third message and will be a separate and distinct people; and though they will be, compared with the mass, a "little flock," yet God will lead them on to certain victory. See Dan. vii, 18. Then there are two other parts, the two great contending political factions which are now being arrayed in almost deadly hostility against each other. Three parts "and the cities of the nations fell!" I am drawn out to make these observations by reading an address to the American people in the Bible Society Record for Dec. 1859, in which the writer seems to be laboring under fearful forebodings of the future of our Nation, in that she is now widely departing from Bible institutions, and he, like as in the Lord's warnings to his people, naturally enough terminates in the Sabbath question, and expresses fears that our "Sabbath worship will be turned into Sundays of revelry," and thus the corner stone of our free institutions be pried out and fearful be the result; and concludes "that he should be considered a traitor whose sacreligous hand should remove it (Sunday) from its ancient place in the wall." Still farther on he remarks, "But what shall cultivate conscience; what shall keep alive in the popular heart such elevated sentiments" (as held by the early settlers of America)? "I answer, the gospel teachings concerning God's moral government. Conscience must fall back upon a revelation, must get its strength from Sinai and its impressiveness from Calvary." Now I ask in all candor, can conscience receive any moral strength by falling back on to the revelation from Sinai, for Sunday keeping? Do the advocates for Sunday observance fail indeed to see that neither Sinai nor Calvary give them any warrant for profaning the seventh day of the week, as required in the fourth precept to be kept holy, and honoring a Pagan festival in its stead? May the Lord speedily deliver his people from fallen Babylon before she is "thrust down with violence to rise no more forever." If this sort of confused divinity as taught by the so-called orthodox ministers is not well suited to set the world's head a reeling and settle them in a general antipathy against all religion, I think the devil will greatly miss his calculation.