The Pacific Christian of September 5 has the following editorial note:—
“A writer in the Occident, referring to an article which had appeared in that paper on ‘Biblical Mistakes and Quotations’ made by men considered pillars in the church, tells of an elder and Sunday School Superintendent in a Presbyterian Church who, while on a journey, wrote to a lady friend, reprimanding her for taking a boat ride on Sunday, in the following language: ‘I am afraid, dear Jennie, that when you took that Sunday boat ride, you forgot that you were breaking the seventh commandment.’ This quotation from the elder’s letter is followed by the writer in the Occident with four exclamation points, to indicate, we suppose, that it was an awful mistake. But suppose he had said ‘the fourth commandment,’ or any other of the ten, would he have been in reality any nearer the real truth?—Hardly. For the young lady went riding on a Sunday, and Sunday is the first day of the week, of which nothing is said specifically in the Ten Commandments. In that ancient document itself it is said that the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord.’ What an awful ‘Biblical mistake’ it is to call the first day of the week the Sabbath!!!!”
True; and is it not just as great a mistake to call the first day of the week “the Lord’s day,” when the Lord says that the Sabbath is “my holy day”? See Mark 2:28; Isa. 58:13; Ex. 20:8–11.
What Will the Effect Be?
What Will the Effect Be?—If Li Hung Chang reads our papers and our books, if he notes the statistics of poverty and wealth, if he sees the statements which are made repeatedly of how millions of dollars are made in “cornering” the necessities of life to force up the price, by illegal combines and trusts, by watering stock, by secret rebates, by the purchase of city councils and state Legislatures,—if these and a thousand other illegal methods and devices of a greedy plutocracy present themselves before him, what will be the effect? How will this “Christian nation,” declared so to be by Supreme Court, affect him? Will it lead to a higher regard for genuine Christianity? Would that he and all others could but know the truth that the world is not Christian; that between Christ and the greedy, grasping, pleasure-loving world there is no concord.
