Читать книгу The Constitutional Amendment: or, The Sunday, the Sabbath, the Change, and Restitution онлайн

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Should any, however, perceiving the dilemma into which they are thrown by the effort to enforce their view in the use of the law, as it was originally given, seek relief in the position that it was so far amended in the days of Christ as to admit of the substitution of the day of his resurrection for that of God’s rest at the end of creation week, we reply, If such a fact can be clearly made out, it would certainly furnish the very help which is needed just at this juncture, and without which confusion must inevitably characterize the movements of those who feel the necessity of a Sabbatic law for the keeping of Sunday.

Let us, therefore, carefully investigate this most important point. Is it true that the Son of God did so change the phraseology of the commandment of the Father that, from his time forward, its utterances have not only justified the secularizing of the last, but have also enforced, by the penalty of eternal death, a strictly religious regard for the first day of the week, on the part of both the Jewish and the Gentile world? Now this, if accomplished, was no trifling affair, and could not have been done in a corner; since it involved the guilt or innocence, the life or death, of countless millions of men and women, whose condemnation in the day of Judgment for the violation of Sunday sanctity would turn, of necessity, upon the words of one who both had the power to change, and had brought the knowledge of that change clearly before them. Certain it is, therefore—since God does not first judge, and legislate afterward—all the light which is necessary for the proper elucidation of this subject is now to be found in his written word. To this, then, we turn; and with a profound conviction that the language of Christ was true in its largest sense, “If any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine,”—we inquire, Where is it stated, in so many words, that God made the amendment in question?