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Sabbath Controversy in Allegan, Mich.

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    What Day is Holy

    MESSRS. EDITORS: Will you allow space for a few words in answer to this question? Intrinsically holiness never belongs to time, as it does not to a place or house. Is the place where thou standeth holy? It is so because a holy Being is present. Is a house holy? It is so merely because it is used for holy employment. The timbers in the most sacred temple or church are no more holy in themselves than those in a store or factory. In like manner, days and hours and minutes have no intrinsic holiness. They are holy only because given to holy thoughts and acts. The scripture law in spirit sets apart every seventh day for holy uses, and the other six for labor. But no hour is named when the seventh day of rest shall begin. But had it fixed upon an hour, as at sundown, then there would be no uniformity except in the same longitude. He who lives in Jerusalem will begin his Sabbath just as the sun disappears beneath the western horizon, and the citizen of London will wait two hours and twenty minutes for his sun to set, and the citizen of New York seven hours and forty minutes, and the citizen of San Francisco ten hours and twenty minutes, and the Christians of Honolulu thirteen hours. A moment’s reflection shows the impossibility of keeping, the world over, the same identical hours for sacred time. Never was such a thing designed, and no time was ever pronounced holy in itself. Who then does not see that this vast ado about the hour or day when we shall begin to rest and engage in holy employments, is far from having any vital importance! Since now there is almost a universal agreement in all Christian lands, that we will begin at midnight by the time in our longitude, on a certain day and keep a Sabbath of twenty-four hours, who expects to turn back the dial one whole day? Will legislatures, courts, and all systems of government be persuaded that they have made a fatal mistake and leaped one day beyond the divine will? Will Christians who conscientiously observe the Lord’s day be driven back into the yoke of Jewish rites? It is a hopeless undertaking. And it surely is no favor to any peaceable community to be disturbed and vexed by raising in the minds of the ill informed conscientious scruples on this subject.SCAM 5.1

    The observance of the day of our Saviour’s resurrection as a Christian Sabbath, and calling it Lord’s day, began with the inspired apostles of Christ. If all christendom is now under a great mistake, it is one made by the apostles under the teachings of their Lord; and who will not feel safe to follow in their footsteps? After the resurrection of Jesus, he met his disciples and said “peace be unto you” several times on the first day of the week, and never as we can learn on the seventh. And in all the New Testament history afterwards we see no reason to suppose that Christians kept any day holy except the first. The Jews of course continued to observe the seventh, and even some converts to Christianity from among Jews observed the seventh day as a festival. But the Lord’s day was universally kept by Christians. Mosheim says in his history, “In the first century, all Christians were unanimous in setting apart the first day of the week on which the Saviour arose from the dead for the solemn celebration of public worship.” Prof. Stuart says, “The zealots of the law wished the Jewish Sabbath to be observed as well as the Lord’s day.” But he adds, “The early Christians, one and all of them held the first day of the week to be sacred.” The apostle John says, “I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day” and about six years after his death Ignatius wrote thus: “Let us (Christians) no longer more sabbatize,” that is keep the seventh day like Jews, “but let us keep the Lord’s day.” No fact in history is better established than that the day of Christ’s resurrection began to be kept sacred by his apostles, with him in their midst, and from that time to the present there has been a wonderful agreement on this subject among all men of learning and candor. I will only add in the language of Ignatius who must have lived in the times of the apostle John, “Let every one that loves Christ, keep holy the Lord’s day, the queen of days, the resurrection day, the highest of all days.”SCAM 6.1

    WATCHMAN.

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