Nor is this the only practical difficulty connected with the views in question. We presume it is the duty of the Masters of our public schools, as well as of the Clergy generally, to teach their charge the Church Catechism. But in the Church Catechism are the following questions and answers:—
Question. You said that your godfathers and godmothers did promise for you, that you should keep God’s commandments. Tell me how many there be.
Answer. Ten.
Question. Which be they?
Answer. The same which God spake in the twentieth chapter of Exodus, &c.
Here is a plain acknowledgment that the ten commandments are still in force, and that we are bound by our baptismal vows to keep them. Dr. Vaughan affirms that they have “ceased to be our rule of life.” How can these conflicting opinions be reconciled? or how can those persons consistently use the formularies of our church, who so directly contradict her teaching?
Having thus noticed more generally what we consider the unscriptural opinions set forth in the pamphlet under review, we shall now proceed to consider more particularly the Sabbath question. This is confessedly one of the great questions of the day. So momentous, indeed, are its bearings on the temporal and spiritual well-being of men, and so intimately is it connected with the worship and honour of God, that its importance can scarcely be overrated. If God is to be publicly acknowledged and worshiped in his own world—if men are to be instructed in the principles of revealed religion, and trained to habits of virtue and christian love—if personal, domestic, social, and national happiness is to be promoted—if time is to be so improved, as to make it the passage to a blessed immortality—the obligation to keep the Sabbath must be recognised, and its observance must be enforced and regulated according to the injunctions of God’s holy word.
It is indeed asserted by some that, under the Christian dispensation, the observance of a day of rest is a mere matter of expediency—that we are under no divine obligation to abstain from labour or other worldly pursuits—that the Sabbath was purely a Jewish institution, and has passed away with the other “weak and beggarly elements” of Judaism. But on what grounds are such assertions made? because, as it is alleged, there is no positive command in the New Testament to keep the Sabbath, “no direction for its observance, nor any reproof for the neglect of it,” and because certain expressions are employed by St. Paul, which seem to bespeak “indifference to its retention, or even rebuke for its revival.”
With regard to the first objection, viz. the want of a direct command, this could scarcely be necessary, inasmuch as our Lord not only himself kept the Sabbath, but in all his remarks in reference to it, spoke in a manner that necessarily implied his recognition of its divine origin and perpetual obligation. Besides, as he expressly declared that he came not to destroy the law or the prophets, (both of which are full of exhortations to keep the Sabbath), what right have we to deny the obligation of the fourth commandment, because it is not expressly repeated in the New Testament? The safer and more just way of reasoning would surely be this: Under the former dispensation God in the most solemn manner promulgated a law, connecting with its observance great temporal and especially great spiritual blessings, and visiting its violation with the most severe judgments. This law has not been formally and explicitly abrogated, nor its sanctions withdrawn. The law, therefore, still remains in force. Shew us that the fourth commandment has been abrogated in as plain terms as those that were employed in its promulgation; and then, and not till then, we may with a safe conscience regard the observance of the Sabbath merely as a matter of Christian expediency.
Where, again, was the necessity of “direction” for the observance of the Sabbath, when the first Christians, (many of whom, as well as the Apostles, were Jews) had the services of the Jewish synagogue as a model, and the plain instructions of the law and prophets to guide them, both as to the proper manner of keeping the Sabbath, and the spirit in which it should be kept? We might as well deny the Christian obligation to maintain the public worship of God, because in the New Testament no directions are given for conducting it.
Nor would the absence of “reproof for the neglect” of the Sabbath be any valid argument against the continued obligation of its observance. If “in the primitive age” there were “churches in which both (the Jewish and the Christian Sabbaths) were observed,” it is scarcely probable that any number of Christians would be found who neglected the Sabbath altogether; and if there was little or no neglect of the observance of the Sabbath, there would be little or no room for reproof on account of its neglect. But is there no reproof to be found in the New Testament? What does St. Paul mean by exhorting the Hebrews not to neglect the assembling of themselves together, as the manner of some was? [12a] Few will deny that this passage refers to the public worship of the Christian church, which we know was held on the Lord’s day. Here, then, we have at least indirect reproof; and its connection with what follows will perhaps suggest an additional reason for the absence of more frequent and more direct reproof. So essential a part of practical Christianity was the observance of the Sabbath deemed, that scarcely any ventured to neglect it, and they who did so, were considered in danger of apostasy. [12b] If the reasons stated be valid arguments against the divine obligation to keep the Sabbath, what can be urged to prove the duty of females to partake of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper? Here, although the institution was entirely new, and peculiar to the new dispensation, yet we find neither direct command, nor reproof for neglect, nor even mention made of any females having partaken of that Sacrament. And yet who would venture to pronounce these sufficient reasons for denying the obligation of women to receive the memorials of their dying Saviour’s love?
With regard to those passages in which “the language employed is” said to be “that either of indifference to its retention, or even of rebuke for its revival,” we apprehend that the intention of the apostle was neither to condemn the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, nor to intimate that Christians were under no moral obligation to keep any Sabbath whatever. If he was speaking exclusively of the Jewish weekly Sabbath (of which there is no sufficient proof), his object was, either to vindicate Gentile Christians from the obligation of its observance, or to condemn the self-righteous spirit in which it was kept. “Let no man judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbaths” (or sabbatical appointments.) [13] All these were Jewish ordinances, from which the council at Jerusalem, guided by the Holy Ghost, had declared Gentile believers to be free. They were local and national, and the various sacrifices and offerings connected with them could be presented only at Jerusalem, and by Jews or proselytes. They were therefore declared to be of no obligation to the Gentile believer. On the contrary, these observances became injurious both to Jewish and Gentile Christians, if they were kept in a self-righteous spirit. “I am afraid of you (says St. Paul to the Galatians), lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.” “Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.” Was the apostle rebuking his brethren for the revival of what had “died out?” Was he not rather blaming them for observing in an antichristian spirit, what they were not bound to observe at all? In his epistle to the Romans, he declares that the observance of these days is in itself a matter of indifference. “One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it to the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it.” [14] How then could he be rebuking the Galatians for simply doing what he himself declares might be done with a good conscience, and acceptably to Christ? Besides if the language of the Apostle must necessarily be understood as conveying rebuke for observing the Sabbath, and consequently be a valid proof, that the obligation to observe it is done away, much more might the same argument be deduced from the still stronger language employed by God in the book of the Prophet Isaiah: “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.” [15] What would have been thought of a Jewish teacher who should have affirmed from this passage, that the rites here enumerated were for ever abolished? And yet such a view would have had more to support it, than the doctrine attempted to be established by the statement of the Apostle. In both cases, we apprehend, it was not the observance that was condemned, nor the obligation that was denied; but the reproof was levelled at the motives and the state of mind by which the observance was attended. An antinomian spirit was condemned by the Prophet—a self-righteous spirit by the Apostle.
The absence of a formal abrogation of the Jewish Sabbath, and the formal substitution of the Christian Sabbath in its place, is in perfect accordance with the whole plan of divine providence, for the introduction and establishment of Christianity in the world. The religion of Moses was never formally abolished. Our Lord lived and died in it; and his Apostles and the early Jewish disciples occasionally at least observed its rites, and still worshiped at the temple and in the synagogue. Both religions were from God. Both had the same end. The same truths and the same spirit were essential to both. The shadows of the one gave place to the substance of the other. But in all that was vital, moral, saving, the two religions were identical. “He was not a Jew who was one outwardly, and circumcision was that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter.” In like manner we conceive, what was purely and necessarily Jewish in the observance of the Sabbath, passed away with the mere externals of Judaism; but all that was essential to the spirit of the command remained in full force.