A New Champion with New Arguments.
By Editor
ARGUMENTS against the Sabbath are about exhausted. We expect soon a very different kind of opposition. Yet there is occasionally found one, who either from forgetfulness or ignorance of what has been written on the subject, imagines that this field is yet uncanvassed, or that he has discovered the philosopher's stone by which all the leaden and pewter theories that have so far been devised against the Sabbathic institution, are transmuted into genuine gold. And there are still found some, more conspicuous of late years on account of their scarcity, the eccentricities of whose crazy logic lead them so far from the regions of reason and common sense, that they produce something new on the subject; for it is a fact that however unbridled may be the imagination of our opponents, or wild their fancies, they rarely, now-a-days present us with anything that is new or novel. Time, past, present and future, earth and sea, near and remote, have been pretty thoroughly ransacked in search of arguments against the existence of Jehovah's rest-day. Men have explored the past dispensation and the present, they have gone to the Patriarchs, to Moses and to Christ, to Jews and Gentiles, to pope and pagan, they have called on revolution, reason and history, astronomy and philosophy; they have traversed the earth with electric speed, they have gone to the north pole and to the south, they have leaped from Jerusalem to San Francisco; they have gone around the world with the sun, and back again at the same marvelous velocity, and have performed almost every other conceivable antic in their raving search for some reason to show that the great God made a mistake in giving to the race of man, in the beginning, a hallowed rest-day, as a great memorial of himself and his glorious work. But a writer has now appeared who is not content with the limited sphere of this earth and the 6,000 years of probationary time, on this question. Bolder or more reckless than his fellows, he leaves time, heaven, earth, the sea and all that in them is, and makes a sublime and magnificent plunge into eternity there to learn that the ten commandments, the decalogue, constitute a law not adapted to this earth, or at least to the gospel dispensation. The article may be found in the Voice of the West of May 2, and the writer, W. Sheldon, appears to be well adapted to make such a perilous leap, being, if we rightly judge, seldom guilty of carrying overmuch ballast. He lays out his work in the close of his first paragraph as follows: "If the decalogue is a perpetual law, it would not only bring the Sabbath commandment into this age, but carry it into the deathless age, with the entire decalogue. Now let us by way of experiment, apply several component parts of this law on the tables of stone, to the age of immortality, and thus learn the result of this claim." He then quotes "Thou shalt not kill," and says that this could not apply in that age, as they could not kill each other if they should try it! Neither could the second commandment apply there, as there will be no iniquity to be visited upon the children, and no persons to be found there to hate God. And as in that world "they neither marry nor are given in marriage," there will be no sons and daughters upon whom to enforce the Sabbath; and he asks, "Will there be lawless strangers occasionally within our gates, in the future world, over whom we must exercise our control to prevent them from breaking the Sabbath? Will we there, as heads of families, have 'sons' and 'daughters,' under our authority, for whose encroachments upon the Sabbath we shall be held responsible?" And as there will be no stealing there, nor committing adultery, nor coveting of a neighbor's wife, so it is claimed the commands touching these points could not be applicable in that age. These, says Mr. S., "are some of the absurdities growing out of the claim that the decalogue was given as a law to be perpetuated without end, which claim is made for the purpose of making it appear that the seventh-day Sabbath is still in force, and is to be in force through eternity." Having thus laid out his premises to his own unbounded satisfaction, apparently, how does he reason from them? Thus: The ten commandments not being arranged for the eternal state, they are not a perpetual law; and if they are not a perpetual law, they become obsolete at the introduction of the deathless age; and if they could become extinct there, they could become extinct before that time, and therefore they did become extinct and cease to exist—at the cross! What marks of astonishment could be appropriately attached to such logic as this! Let us try a parallel case: The banks of the Mississippi river do not extend through the Gulf of Mexico to the West Indies, therefore there is no Mississippi river through the Gulf of Mexico; therefore the Mississippi ceases when it reaches the Gulf; and if it may cease then, it may cease further up; and hence it does cease and become dried up—at St. Louis! But if the commandments do not exist in the immortal state, because the circumstances of that state are such that they cannot apply to them, if this is the reason they do not exist there, as Mr. S.'s position assumes, then the inevitable consequence follows, that the commandments exist, so long as circumstances exist to which they can apply. This is all the eternity we want for the law. We never supposed that God spoke to dead men or to angels, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife." But the circumstances of mankind at the present time are notoriously such as would come within the application of the ten commandments, and will be, so long as this dispensation continues. Therefore the commandments now exist, and are binding, on Mr. S.'s own showing, and will exist until at least, the eternal state is ushered in. Put in another form, his argument stands thus: The commandments are not binding in the future state, because they are not applicable to the circumstances of that state; therefore they are not binding in the present state, notwithstanding they are applicable to the circumstances of this state. In other words, license is taken from the future, to which it is supposed the law will not apply, to discard it in the present, to which it does apply. We think it would be quite as wise to wait till that future state arrives. Inasmuch, therefore, as the circumstances of the present dispensation are such that the ten commandments are fully applicable to them, if they are not now binding, it must be for some other reason than the supposed fact that they will not be binding in the future. The reference, therefore, to the future state is altogether irrelevant. We are amenable to the same God, tempted by the same Devil, exposed to the same sins, and dependent on the same Saviour, as the men of the former dispensation; and if the moral principles by which we are to be governed are different from theirs, let Mr. S. show it; and when he attempts this, it will be time to follow him further on this point. There is another conclusion involved in the position under notice. If the ten commandments are not a perpetual law, continually binding upon men, because not to be binding in a future state, it follows that whatever can be shown to be binding in that state, is an eternal and perpetual law, binding continually upon men here and hereafter. Now, of the Sabbath, the Lord expressly says by the prophet, that as the new heavens and the new earth shall remain before him, the seed and name of his people shall remain, and from one Sabbath to another all flesh shall come to worship before him. Isa. lxvi, 23. The whole object of Mr. S. against the decalogue is to get rid of the Sabbath; and it is a little singular that he should go forward into eternity for an argument to prove the abolition of that very institution which God expressly declares shall exist throughout all eternity. The Sabbath there meets him, with the same seal of divinity upon its brow which it received from the hand of God at the beginning, and there it is appointed to be co-eternal with the new heavens and new earth. He asks if there will be sons and daughters, upon whom to enforce the Sabbath; if there will be strangers wandering about to come within our gates; and if we shall have men-servants and maid-servants in that future state. Such puerile questions we leave him to settle with his Bible. We prefer to believe the inspired record that the Sabbath will be there, and that all flesh will come up together to worship upon it before the Lord of hosts. Futile is any effort to overthrow the Sabbath by trying to show that the other commandments will not exist in the future state, so long as the record remains that the Sabbath itself shall be there in all its might and glory. It was a fatal oversight that concealed this point from his view. But nothing could be more appropriate than that a person entering on a blind raid into the eternal state, for the purpose of demolishing the Sabbath, should dash his own brains out, against the very institution which he sought to destroy. His efforts to show that the decalogue is not appropriate to the gospel dispensation, we defer noticing till another time.