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

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Nor is this all; behind all this pretentious claim for an amended law are very many indications of a wide-spread conviction—though undefined and hardly recognized by the individuals themselves—that the fact upon which they place so much stress is, after all, one in regard to which there are serious doubts in their own minds. As an illustration of this, we have but to call attention to two things. First, on each Lord’s day, so-called, thousands of congregations—after devoutly listening to the reading of the fourth commandment of the decalogue, word for word, syllable for syllable, letter for letter, precisely as it was written upon the table of stone by the finger of God—are in the habit of responding with solemn cadence to the utterances of the preacher, “O Lord, incline our hearts to keep this law.” Now this prayer means something, or nothing. It is either an expression of desire, on the part of those employing it, for grace to enable them rightly to observe the commandment as it reads—seventh day and all—or else it is a solemn mockery, which must inevitably provoke the wrath of Heaven. These people, therefore, judging from the most charitable stand-point, are witnesses—unconscious though they may be of the fact—of a generally pervading opinion that the verbiage of the fourth commandment has not been changed, and that it is as a whole as binding as ever. Second, nor is it simply true that those only who have a liturgy have committed themselves to this idea. It is astonishing to what extent it has crept into creeds, confessions of faith, church disciplines, and documents of a like nature. But among the most striking of all evidences of its universality, when properly understood, is the practice of nearly all religious denominations of printing, for general distribution among the Sunday-school scholars, verbatim copies of the decalogue, as given in the twentieth chapter of Exodus. Yet this practice would be a pernicious one, and worthy of the most severe censure, as calculated to lead astray and deceive the minds of the young, if it were really true that this code, in at least one very important particular, failed to meet the facts in the case, as it regards present duty.