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

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If these missionaries were advocates of the first-day Sabbath, and we were of the number, for our part, this is what we would do: We would practice for ourselves the observance of what we are persuaded is the Christian Sabbath. We would multiply and scatter abroad copies of the entire Bible, and seek to convince the people and the nation that God’s law requires the observance of the first day. In the meantime, confident that, by the blessing of the Head of the church, the circulation of the divine word and the proclamation of its truths would at length change the conviction of the islanders, we should say to them: “Do not cease to observe a day of rest and worship. To have one such a day in every seven is right. Do not blot out its acknowledgment from the Constitution. You need its legal safe-guards. True, there is no divine warrant for the observance of the fourth day of the week instead of the first. But a fourth-day Sabbath is better than no Sabbath at all. We will help you to preserve from the assaults of our common enemies the observances of the Sabbath, that you may have them to transfer, as we urge you to do, to the first day of the week.” Would the advocates of the seventh-day Sabbath do otherwise, except in substituting the seventh day for the first? And now let us take the actual, corresponding case in our own land. The great mass of Christians here, as elsewhere, regard the first day of the week as the Sabbath of the Lord. Admit, for the sake of the illustration, that they have no better ground for their opinion than the islanders mentioned above. Is it not right for them to have a day of rest and worship? Is it not right for them to observe one such a day in seven? Is it maintained that, because the day is not the proper one, there is and can be nothing right about these Sabbath observances? Then, if all is wrong, it must be better to have no Sabbath at all, and utterly secularize the week. This, our seventh-day friends cannot and will not admit. They gladly testify that our first-day Sabbath, poorly as it may be observed, is infinitely to be preferred to the unbroken current of the worldliness of the week. A Sabbathless week; successive rounds of equally secularized days, marked, if marked at all, by the recurrence of unusual worldly gayety and dissipation; this is what infidelity and atheism would give us for the existing Sabbath. Do the friends of the seventh-day Sabbath desire any such substitution? Their argument against the proposed amendment on the ground that it expressly or impliedly contains an acknowledgment of the first-day Sabbath, is, that it will enforce existing Sabbath laws, and strengthen first-day Sabbath observances. But is it not better to do this than accept the dread alternative? Even from this point of view, then, we claim for the proposed amendment, what in some cases it has actually, and, we believe, most consistently, received, the approval and support of seventh-day Sabbatarians.