Your ShelfYour Projects

Review and Herald, Vol. 91, No. 28.

Questions and Answers

Review and Herald

Jul 9, 1914

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 9, 1914

Questions and Answers

By Editor

In this department there will be considered from time to time helpful and practical questions relating to the various phases of this message, church government, Christian doctrine, duty, experience, etc. The editors reserve the right to consider only those questions which in their judgment will prove of benefit to the readers of the REVIEW. All questions should be addressed to the editor.
6. A brother raises the question as to whether it is proper to use the Sabbath service as an occasion for the announcement of classes, social gatherings, and questions of this character.
It would be difficult, of course, to lay down a rigid rule which could be applied in every church with reference to these matters. We believe, however, that there is a too liberal tendency creeping into some of our churches in the making of announcements of this character at the Sabbath service. On account of the scattered membership of some of our churches and the inability of the church officers to secure a general attendance outside of the Sabbath service, it has become customary to deal more or less with the business matters of the church on the Sabbath day. While we are not prepared to condemn in toto this practice, we believe that just as far as possible the Sabbath should be safeguarded from matters of this character. The tendency of the human heart is toward laxity. We do not see in the lives of some of our people that careful regard for the Sabbath of the Lord which once marked their Sabbath observance. Let us not lower the standard; rather, let us raise it the higher. Honoring God in the time which he has reserved for himself, in both our personal and family life as well as in the work of the church, will bring to us the Sabbath blessing which God has placed in the day, making it indeed a Sabbath not only of physical rest for our bodies, but of spiritual rest to our souls.
7. Should unbaptized believers be received into the church or take part in Communion service?
The instruction of the Scriptures, together with the practice of the early church as recorded in the inspired record, leads to the inevitable conclusion that in God's design baptism constitutes the door into the visible church of Christ. The commission to the church is, “Teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” At the time of Pentecost, baptism following repentance, brought the infilling of the Holy Spirit, and those thus publicly manifesting their faith, numbering about three thousand, were said to be “added unto them”—the church. Acts 2:41. And in this manner “the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” Verse 47. This experience was duplicated many times in the early church. See Acts 8:12, 13; 10:48; 16:31-33, etc. This divine order has been recognized by every branch of the Christian church from the days of the apostles to the present time. With few exceptions, it has always been regarded by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Under some circumstances, where conversions have occurred and no immediate opportunity was afforded for baptism, the believers have been voted into the church subject to the performance of such rite. While in very exceptional cases this possibly may be allowable, the practice is becoming, in some of our churches, altogether too common, and has an influence to create confusion and to break down gospel order. We believe fewer exceptions should be made to the gospel order of procedure in receiving members into the church.
The Lord’s Supper is an ordinance of the church of God. It is a means whereby, following his baptismal vows, the believer is afforded opportunity to show his faith in the sacrifice of his divine Lord. It appears quite inappropriate for one who has not taken the initial steps, who has not signified his purpose, by baptism; to dedicate his life henceforth to the service of his Master, to engage in the ordinances of the church. These ordinances were instituted for the church, and not for the outside world. And this is true, too, we believe, as applied to unconverted children and infants, who are sometimes permitted by their parents to partake of these sacred emblems. We can never bring people up to the true standard by lowering the standard. We need carefully to recognize the distinction which God has made between the holy and the profane.
8. A sister inquires if it would not be advisable for the officers of our churches to keep in close touch with nonresident members, so that these individuals may know where to send their tithe and donations.
This suggestion, we believe, is a good one. Many have drifted away from this movement, and been swallowed up by the worldly influences which surrounded them, because, in their isolation, they were not followed up by kindly interest on the part of their brethren and sisters. The officers of our churches should come into touch with these absent ones at least every quarter if possible. Let us remember by kindly, helpful words and in frequent prayer the lonely sheep of the fold.
9. A brother in Michigan asks us to explain Isa. 65:20.
The editor has never yet seen an explanation of this scripture which was satisfactory to his own mind. He has listened to many theories and speculations regarding its meaning. Some claim that the one hundred years brought to view in this scripture are identical with the little season spoken of in Rev. 20:3, when Satan is loosed,—the time between the resurrection of the wicked and their final destruction in the lake of fire. The scripture may have its application at that time. It is well, we believe, for all to reserve final judgment on the meaning, and seek by further study confirmation of present positions or further light which the Spirit of God may reveal.
There are some things in the Scriptures of Truth which are plainly revealed; we need not hesitate as to their meaning. We know that Jesus Christ is our Saviour from sin; we know that repentance of sin and confession on our part will bring to us God’s pardoning mercy; we know that immersion is the Bible method of baptism; that the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord; that Jesus is soon coming; that great lines of prophecy are fulfilling before our eyes; and many other plain, positive truths which make for salvation. On these we may take our position with positive assurance. But we need to avoid dogmatism. We need to hold our minds open, through study and prayer, for the Spirit’s revealings.
There is enough plainly revealed in the inspired record to bring to us the salvation of God if followed out in our lives, or to condemn us at the last great day if rejected by us. Let us give careful heed to these clearly revealed truths, while at the same time we follow on to know more perfectly the ways and meaning of the Lord in those scriptures not now clear to our understanding.
10. Does the Bible uphold slavery?
The teaching of the Scriptures is against the principle of slavery, whether applied to slavery of the conscience, mind, or body. In the laws which God provided through Moses for the government of Israel, slavery is recognized as an existing institution of that period, a practice common among nearly all the nations of antiquity. Lev. 25:39-46. But the slavery permitted in Israel partook more of the character of serfdom than of slavery as practiced by the heathen. It undoubtedly bestowed upon the captives many liberties and privileges which were in excess of those they enjoyed in their native state. The children of Israel were admonished to remember that they were bondmen in the land of Egypt, and that therefore they should treat their captive servants with the utmost consideration. Deut. 15:15. The bondage of Israelitish brethren was permitted for certain abuses, such as debt, etc. This bondage, however, appears to have been anything but rigorous, and continued only until the obligation was discharged or until the year of jubilee.
God’s dealings with his people of old, and with the heathen nations whom they supplanted, we may not be able clearly to reason out or fully to understand in detail. We must recognize, however, the superiority of his wisdom and the infinitude of his love, and that in all his dealings with the human family he works for the highest and eternal good of his creatures rather than for their temporal or material advantage. Doubtless many captives enslaved by the Israelites were brought to a saving knowledge of the true God, even as was Onesimus, the slave servant of Philemon. The truth of God in every age has taken men where they were, whether free or bond physically, and called them to be God’s free men spiritually. Christ, during his earthly ministry, did not seek to change social or political conditions. He sought as far as consistent and possible to mitigate the suffering caused by these evils. His appeal was for the enfranchisement of conscience and mind, rather than of the body. Physical bonds cannot shut out the freedom of the soul. The most terrible slavery, after all, is the slavery of sin, and freedom from its bondage should be the desire and purpose of all. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

J. N. LOUGHBOROUGH

By John Norton Loughborough

The Second Advent Movement — No. 1

J. N. LOUGHBOROUGH

“Call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great fight of afflictions; partly, whilst ye were made a gazingstock both by reproaches and afflictions; and partly, whilst ye became companions of them that were so used. For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance. Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward. For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But we are not of them that draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.” Heb. 10: 32-39.
HERE we have the experience of the apostolic church linked with that of the church waiting for Christ’s second coming. This, because there is a similarity in the experiences of the two. The commission to the apostles was, “As ye go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” Matt. 10: 7. Concerning their work, note this interesting comment:—
“Their minds had become imbued with the popular conception of the Messiah as a temporal prince, who was to exalt Israel to the throne of universal empire, and they could not understand the meaning of his words foretelling his sufferings and death. Christ himself had sent them forth with the message, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.’ [Mark 1:15.] That message was based on the prophecy of Daniel 9. The sixty-nine weeks were declared by the angel to extend ‘to the Messiah the prince,’ and with high hopes and joyful anticipation the disciples looked forward to the establishment of Messiah’s kingdom at Jerusalem, to rule over the whole earth.
“They preached the message which Christ had committed to them, though they themselves misapprehended its meaning. While their announcement was founded on Dan. 9:25, they did not see, in the next verse of the same chapter, that Messiah was to be cut off. From their very birth their hearts had been set upon the anticipated glory of an earthly empire, and this blinded their understanding alike to the specifications of the prophecy and to the words of Christ.
“They performed their duty in presenting to the Jewish nation the invitation of mercy, and then, at the very time when they expected to see their Lord ascend the throne of David, they beheld him seized as a malefactor, scourged,—derided and condemned, and lifted upon the cross of Calvary. . . .
“Christ had come at the exact time and in the manner foretold by prophecy. The testimony of Scripture had been fulfilled in every detail of his ministry. He had preached the message of salvation, and ‘his word was with power.’ The hearts of his hearers had witnessed that it was of Heaven. The Word and the Spirit of God attested the divine commission of his Son.”—“Great Controversy,” edition 1911, pages 345, 346.
In the recorded public prayer of Christ we have his approval of the work of the apostles, in these words: “I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.” John 17: 6-8.
We have seen how the Lord used the disciples to give a timely and true message, and yet they met with a disappointment in their expectations because of their misconception of how what they heralded was to be accomplished. Those who first gave the message of the second advent were disappointed in their expectations for a similar reason. The message they claimed to be giving is found in Rev. 14: 6, 7, symbolized by an angel who had “the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come.”
The very event which they proclaimed—the judgment—did come, but not in harmony with their conceptions concerning it. For centuries the idea of the church, both Protestant and Catholic, was that the judgment would be introduced by the second coming of Christ. When William Miller made a statement of the “order of events in the judgment,”it was not new with him; but he simply voiced the sentiment of the religious world, in stating,—
“1. He [God] has appointed a day of judgment.
“2. The judgment follows the resurrection.
“3. His saints are raised and judged at the second coming of Christ.”
From many lines of prophetic fulfillment, the Adventists could show that the coming of Christ was at the door; and if they could find the definite period of time leading to the close of Christ’s priestly work, and the opening of the judgment, they supposed it would be the actual time of his second coming. How they found this period, and their disappointment, will appear in further study.

Shadows

By Eliza H. Morton

ELIZA H. MORTON
When rays of light are intercepted, a shadow is produced. Our days are compared to a shadow, because life has been intercepted by sin, which brings death. It is the privilege of every child of God so to live that no shadow of sin will come between him and the Eternal. The happy life is to feel at night that every sin has been forgiven, and that, so far as we know, we have walked with God.
It is Satan’s settled plan to study the weak points of every soul, and to bring upon those points all the power of his evil agencies. Sometimes it may be hard to determine the line between right and wrong; but the Bible is our guide, and if we follow its principles and precepts, the shadows will depart, and the Light of life enable us to discern clearly the way. “God is our refuge,” and the only way to avoid the shadows is to keep the heart “with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”
Those who are in darkness may walk, but it is a sad journey in the shadow of their own wickedness, and along a path from which the shadows never flee away, unless the feet turn toward the Light of the world.
Let’s find the thing which loosens Our hold on God today, Let’s shun the gloomy shadows, And watch and hope and pray.

“Train Young America to Shoot”

By S. B. Horton

S. B. HORTON
DESPITE the fact that peace arbitration treaties are being encouraged with commendable zeal, and despite the fact that many are being lulled to sleep by the peace-and-safety cry of the theorist, the nations of the world are making the greatest preparation for war that was ever known.
A very significant address was recently prepared by Secretary of War Garrison, on the subject of war preparation in connection with the educational institutions. After calling attention to the matter of perfecting men in marksmanship so that they may become fairly efficient in a short space of time, the Secretary said, in part:— “France, with government aid, teaches rifle shooting in the primary schools, to boys of ten years of age and upwards. In Italy the departments of war and education cooperate in this teaching, and include secondary schools. Australia has 40,000 schoolboys organized as cadet companies that receive arms and ammunition free. Canada has a private donation of $100,000 for encouragement of military training and rifle practice.
“In the United States, exclusive of those in the military or naval service, we have 3,000 members of rifle clubs and about 8,000 students of military schools and colleges,—a total of only 11,000 who have received outdoor rifle practice, a number almost negligible. To these might be added about 25,000 boys who have had indoor gallery practice of some sort or other.
“The United States government has so far aided in remedying this condition only by the appropriation of $30,000 annually for ammunition for students of educational institutions to which officers of the regular army are detailed as instructors, and in allowing rifle clubs affiliated with the National Rifle Association to purchase arms at cost. Only a small number of rifles have been sold for this purpose. If as many as two persons used each rifle sold, the total number would not exceed 4,000.
“There is now a bill before Congress to appropriate $100,000 for the promotion of rifle practice in public schools, colleges, universities, and civilian rifle clubs. If properly applied, this will be of great help. Of the different educational institutions the public schools are the most important, not only on account of the greater number of students, but on account of the age of the students. Shooting in schools of this class should be made compulsory to the extent of at least two hundred rounds per boy, .22 caliber gallery rifle, with the necessary preliminary sighting and aiming drills, in such States as will so provide for by law. The national board for the promotion of rifle practice is recommended to have supervision of this work and superintend such competitions as may be prescribed.
“Every male citizen of the United States is, by Constitutional law, a member of the unorganized militia, and, in time of war, may be called upon to serve in the land forces of his country. It is therefore every man’s or boy’s duty as a good citizen to prepare himself to perform the service with credit to himself and the greatest amount of benefit to his country.”—National Sunday Magazine, April, 1914.
When the public schools shall be required (as is hoped for by church and state devotees) to teach Christianity as part of its curriculum, and adopt the rifle practice policy, then will the people witness a spectacle of incongruous character. This possibility should serve as a warning to parents who have children to prepare for the future. Shall they be prepared for the kingdoms of this world, or for the everlasting kingdom?

Brotherly Love

By Edward Quinn, Jr.

EDWARD QUINN, JR.
When connected with the surgical ward of a large medical institution several years ago, I was much impressed with the spirit shown by the different fraternal orders toward those of their members who had undergone surgical operations. Almost daily cut flowers and plants were sent to brighten patients during their hours of suffering. When they were convalescing, reading matter was sent, and the usual inquiry was: “Now isn’t there something else we can do for you? Do not be afraid to say so, for we are only too glad to do it for you.”
One case in particular I well remember. The patient’s body was crushed severely, and both his legs were broken. He was in the ward for months, and all that time a certain lodge cared for him, and also provided for his family.
Many times since, I have thought, If such a helpful spirit is manifest in worldly organizations, how much more should brethren and sisters in the church be helpful to one another!
Let us learn a lesson from these worldly organizations, and heed the admonition given in the Word of God in 1 John 4:21: “And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.”
Takoma Park, D. C.

The Transformation

By WILLIAM BRICKEY

WILLIAM BRICKEY
A certain man once dwelt with me; A proud, deceitful man was he. He bore my name, but now I see     It was the old man, Adam. I loved him as I loved my life, And often told my loving wife That she it was who caused the strife,     And not the old man, Adam.
He was rebellious from the start; Hatred and envy filled his heart, His tongue was like a fiery dart,—     That spiteful old man, Adam. Ensconced beneath my sheltering wing, His poison venom he would sling At every disconcerting thing,—     That wrathful old man, Adam.
To appetites and passions strong He bound me with a brazen thong, To serve his purpose, right or wrong,—     That lustful old man, Adam,— Until I cried with all my breath: “Who shall deliver me from death, And tame this spirit from beneath,     This sinful old man, Adam?”
At once a stronger Man came in, And overthrew this man of sin: And since that time my guest has been     Jesus, the second Adam. To sin this old man, Adam, died, And with him envy, hate, and pride; To me the world was crucified     With Christ, the second Adam.
Now, though I wander north or south, Though seasons change, by flood or drought,     He puts a new song in my mouth,     This blessed new man, Adam; He teaches peace, good will to men, The end of sin, the end of pain, When Christ the Lord returns to reign     As King,—the new man, Adam.
Kamiah, Idaho.

Not Forsaken by the Lord

ONE of the missionaries in Shanghai writes:—
“A young Chinese machinist, Zau Khwe Foh, after hearing the message of Christ’s soon return, decided to unite with those who are looking for his appearing. His employer permitted him to retain his position for a time, but finally discharged him because of the inconvenience of releasing him from work on the Sabbath. However, Zau Khwe Foh trusted the Lord to provide a way by which he could support his family.
“A short time after this, two of our brethren in Shanghai who knew the circumstances lent him sufficient money to start a small business of his own. Within three months he was able to return the borrowed capital, and now he and six other men employed by him have sufficient work to keep them busy all the time. Truly the Lord never forsakes those who are faithful to him.”

Meeting Whatever Comes

“WHATEVER is coming, there is but one way to meet it,—to go straight forward, to bear what is to be borne, and to do what is to be done.”

Reforming the Life by Changing the Heart

“Out of it [the heart] are the issues of life.” Prov. 4:23. The only way to bring about a change in the life is to effect a change in the heart, from which spring all the underlying motives and purposes which shape and mold the outward experience. Israel of old sought through outward forms and ceremonies to effect this change. By their own promises, resolutions, and will power they thought they could make themselves a peculiar people, a holy nation. But the spirit of inspiration declares that this old covenant relationship was weak, and powerless to accomplish the desires of God for his people. In its place the Lord established the new covenant. Hebrews 8.
This new covenant relationship works from within outward. In its operation the Lord declares, “I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts.” We must learn, as did Israel of old, that the children of God are “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man.” Never by power of will alone can we become Christians, and so yield ourselves to God that the heart will be sanctified and placed under the control of the Holy Spirit. It is for us to choose the right, to open our hearts to receive of the ministry of grace. This permits God to come in and to change and fashion us after his own divine image.
Sometimes in instructing those newly come to the faith, and for that matter some who have been connected with the church for years, it becomes necessary to admonish them against conformity to the world, its follies, and fashions. If in this instruction the heart can be reached and the viewpoint of the individual changed, the battle is won. It accomplishes but little to sound the warning cry against these evils unless by the Spirit of the Lord there can be wrought in the hearts of those we warn a change of desires and purposes. We may frown upon these evils; we may read the warnings given in the Scriptures and in the Testimonies against them, and for a time secure acquiescence on the part of those concerned. But this change will not be maintained unless the heart is converted.
The truly converted man desires to know but one thing, and that is that he is accepted of the Lord. Knowing this, he stops at no sacrifice. He has given himself to his Master for willing, loving service, and in his dress, deportment, and his entire life his first thought is the glory of the one he serves and the pleasure of his will. God’s way of reforming the life is by changing the heart. This is the way of the new covenant. Let us seek to change our own life experience by this divine method, and let us in our labor for others employ the way of the new covenant instead of the plan of the old.

A Mission of Ruin

By C. M. S.

FROM time to time we see statements in temperance journals, and in journals that are not special advocates of temperance, setting forth the great waste that comes to the nation each year through the use of intoxicants. We look at these statements and figures in a general way, but do not comprehend the mighty amounts set before us, and so fail to appreciate what the figures mean to the individual persons whose savings have been swallowed up in the mammoth totals.
For instance, there are in the United States over two hundred thousand saloons, or about one saloon to every four hundred persons. The people spend about one billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars annually for liquor.
That is the money outlay; but the real cost of the terrible depredation on the human race no figures can give. There is no formula for its expression.
It means that about one and a quarter billion dollars have been turned out of the channels of legitimate use into the channel of abuse and waste.
In hundreds of thousands of cases it means that the craving for liquor has been dulled for a few moments at the cost of the actual deprivation of food and clothing for those dependent upon the wages earned.
It means in thousands upon thousands of cases that women who have placed the keeping of their lives and the lives of their little ones in the hands of those they loved, have had to stand and see that trust betrayed for the appeasing of an unnatural and insatiate appetite.
It means that children, whose very birth is a legal lien upon the producing powers of the parents, are, in many thousands of homes, sent to school breakfastless and insufficiently clad, and go hungry to bed year in and year out.
It means that laws which are for the guarding of life are in effect nullified by other laws which give to this breeder of crime the right to carry on its business at the expense of the peace and the property and the lives of men, women, and children.
It means the keeping of jails, State prisons, asylums, and hospitals filled with men and women, who, but for the liquor business, would be filling the places designed for them in the affairs of the world.
It means the outlay of millions of dollars every year in this country for the support of policemen, lawyers, courts, jails, prisons, and wardens, which would, were it not for the liquor business, remain in the pockets of the people.
And it means more than that. It means that every year thousands of young men and women are taught the way to the pit of perdition; that the light in the eyes of the soul is dulled, the hope in the breast of a multitude is chilled; and that the love for the things of God in the hearts of such ones is fast going out or is perished already. There is nothing good the liquor traffic has ever done; there is nothing evil it has ever hesitated to do.
It has never stimulated a holy thought, but it has urged on the cause of the kingdom of darkness at a furious pace.
It has built no hospitals, established no foundling asylums or homes for the poor; but it has not hesitated to crowd the walls of all that have been established, as well as the jails, asylums, and penitentiaries, with the ripened fruit of its terrible planting.
It has lifted no burden of debt from the widow or fatherless; but it has pasted mortgages on millions of deeds, and hung the red flag of the auctioneer on the gatepost of many a ruined home.
It has established no schools for the education of the young, but it has set the seal of imbecility on thousands of the unborn, clothed the children of its victims in a garb of rags, and turned them into truants and tramps.
That is what it has done generally, and all know it. They read the figures and listen to the speeches, and forget the tragedies that it is enacting in millions of homes, each one with its terrible setting of blasted hopes and bitter heartaches. Never a home is established that is not built on hope and pleasant anticipations; but never a home has liquor entered that it has not torn hopes and heartstrings like a maddened bull. Once inside, it has never been satisfied until it has strewn the last timbers of hope’s building upon the ground.
The individual deceives himself into believing that he is enjoying, at little expense, a harmless pastime, which he can abandon at a moment’s notice. Never was there greater deception, and never a captor that continued so long to deceive so great a body of people at the same time.
In very many homes the husband comes to his family at the week’s end with every dollar of his wages squandered. The rent is past due, and the landlord obdurate; the grocery bills are unpaid, and the grocer will give no more credit; the children are too poorly clothed to attend church or school, and sometimes even to be seen upon the street; the very cheapest food is obtained, and the stomachs of the children cry for food, while their forms are emaciated and their eyes grow big with hunger. One does not have to draw upon fancy to conjure up a picture like this. The cities are full of them. There are no words that can paint the picture of such things as they actually exist in thousands upon thousands of homes in our own land.
As a waster strong drink has no equal; as a mocker it is beyond comparison. The holiest relations of life it handles with the most ruthless mockery. It laughs at domestic peace, and stirs up discord in its place. It promises the husband a pleasant evening with his friends, and then sends him home to abuse the best and most trusting friend he has. In the glow of the first glass it promises him temporal success; and then, when it has wound its coils about him, it takes from him everything he did possess, and turns him and his family into the street. It promises him promotion in his occupation, and then takes away from his hands the steadiness and skill that are necessary to enable him to hold even the position he has. It promises him fluency of speech, and then robs him of his brains, thickens his tongue, and gives him the speech of the lunatic.
The army officer needs it to “steady his nerves,” and he takes it, and loses the battle. The soldier needs it to brace him up for a dangerous undertaking; he takes it, forgets his mission, and is captured by the foe. The orator needs it to give him freedom of utterance; he takes it, and disgusts his audience. The financier needs it to help him consummate a deal; he takes it, and when the deal is consummated, his fortune is gone and his friends desert him. The common man has needed it all his life as a stimulant; and while he has imagined he was being stimulated to greater accomplishments, he was standing still and watching the procession go past; and when he looks back upon a life now nearly spent, he finds that his progress has been retrogression, and the grade of his path has been downward day by day.
Every year nearly a hundred thousand persons can look back upon a life thus misspent and wasted in this country alone; for that many new drunkards’ graves each year testify to the wasting and mockery of the demon of drink in the United States.
Because these things are terrible facts, no child should go out from under the parental roof until he has been made to understand clearly the awful dangers and evils of drink. The girls should know it as well as the boys, and should be taught to shun the companionship of those who either conduct or patronize the business.
The saloon jeopardizes every interest of the home. It cannot live without sacrificing those interests. Souls are its victims, and it snatches them from the homes of rich and poor alike. There is no satisfying of its appetite, no set boundary to its field of operations, no trust too holy for it to violate, no right too sacred for it to trample upon, no child so beautiful that it would hesitate to set the red brand of ruin upon its forehead.
The Christian must ostracize it as the very embodiment of sin and ruin that it is. He can have no fellowship with it without being a part of it. He cannot be guiltless before God if he fails to educate his children to look upon it as the leprosy of death, and to avoid it as they would the companionship of the evil one himself, whose advance agent and greatest reaper it is.
C. M. S.

No Scripture Authority for Sunday

By W. A. S.

THE admission that there is no Scripture authority for Sunday observance is so general, and so many testimonies have been given, that it may seem almost useless to multiply the quotations from various writers. However, here are a few that we do not remember having seen in print among us:—
Smith and Cheetham’s “Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,” issued many years ago in London, is counted one of the world’s standard works, and is the source from which statements have been taken for Bible dictionaries and other volumes. Under the word Sabbath it says:—
The notion of a formal substitution by apostolic authority of the Lord’s Day for the Jewish sabbath, and the transference to it, perhaps in a spiritualized form, of the Sabbatical obligation established by the promulgation of the fourth commandment, has no basis whatever, either in Holy Scripture or in Christian antiquity.
On the idea of the Sabbatical observance of Sunday, the Dictionary further says:—
The idea afterward embodied in the title of the “Christian sabbath,” and carried out in ordinances of Judaic rigor, was, so far as we can see, entirely unknown in the early centuries of Christianity.
The late Dr. F. W. Farrar (archdeacon of Westminster), in his work “The Voice From Sinai,” says:—
The Sabbath is Saturday, the seventh day of the week; it was to be kept holy by consecrating it to God.—Page 149.
He argues that the essence and principle of the fourth commandment applies to Sunday, and adds:—
The Christian church made no formal, but a gradual and almost unconscious transference of the one day to the other.—Page 152.
Another word as to this “unconscious” substitution comes from Wm. B. Dana, in “A Day for Rest and Worship” (Revell and Company), page 174:—
Bear in mind that the substitution [of the first for the seventh day] was not a coerced happening; it could not be a sudden, but only a very slow development, probably never anticipated, never even designed or put into shape by those chiefly interested, but creeping almost unconsciously into being.
So, like certain characters spoken of by Jude who “crept in unawares,” the Sunday institution came creeping in.
Haydn’s “Dictionary of Dates,” article “Sabbath,” says:—
The earliest law by which the observance of the first day of the week was ordained is the edict of Constantine, 321.
“Curiosities of Popular Customs,” by Wm. S. Walsh, says:—
Sunday. The first day of the week, named after the sun, and therefore an evident relic of sun worship. In French it is Dimanche, in Italian Dominica, both from Dominus, “the Lord.” Christians, with the exception of the Seventh-day Adventists, have substituted it as a day of rest and prayer in lieu of the Jewish sabbath.—Page 901.
McClintock and Strong’s “Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature,” under article on “Sabbath,” after speaking of the New Testament texts, says:—
These arguments, it is true, are not satisfactory to some, and it must be confessed that there is no law in the NewTestament concerning the first day.
Of the suggestion that Christ, as Lord of the Sabbath, had power to abolish it, the article says:—
It seems as if some cannot think of power in connection with the Sabbath unless as exercised in abrogation. If it be placed in Christ’s charge, they take it for granted that more or less extinction must be the consequence. They speak as if Christ’s scepter were an ax, and the only question were how much it would hew down and devastate. We maintain, on the contrary, that Christ would not be the Lord of the Sabbath to be its destroyer.
After all, what men say about God’s Sabbath is of no authority. When all the books have been written, and all the explanations made, the living God who made the Sabbath still says, “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.”
W. A. S.
Continue reading: The World's Wealth