The sanctification of the Lord's day by meeting in honor of the resurrection of the Saviour, and especially with a reference to the celebration of the Lord's supper, is essential to the edification, spirituality, holiness, usefulness and happiness of the Christian community. It is not designed to throw into the shade any other duties of the Christian Church while contending for those above stated; but because no society save the Disciples of Christ so regard, observe and celebrate the Lord's day. We endeavor to arrest the attention of our fellow professors to the great design of it and of the coming together of the members of Christ's family on that day. When assembled for this chief purpose, the reading of the Scriptures, teaching, exhortation, prayer, praise, contributions for the poor, and discipline when called for, are all in order and necessary to the growth of the Christian Church in all the graces of the Spirit, and in all the fruits of holiness.—ALEX. CAMPBELL, in Millennial Harbinger, Vol. I., p. 534, New Series.
And what an audacious wrong and unutterable blunder would it be for God's chosen people to adopt an order that should defraud themselves, their children, their neighbors and their neighbor's children of such a glorious privilege.
If we could imagine two communities, one of which should, with their children and their children's children, diligently devote the Lord's day to purposes of moral, religious and intellectual improvement, while the other community should waste the day in idle and frivolous dissipation, what unmeasured progress would ultimately be made by one beyond that made by the other. And to which of these two classes will that favored people belong to whom will be awarded the high privilege of introducing among jarring sects and parties the true millennial church?
And do not these considerations go far to explain the contrast that is everywhere seen to exist between Protestant and Catholic countries? Among Protestants the day is a day to be sanctified to purposes of religious worship, among Catholics it is a holiday.
The peculiarity of our position creates an invincible necessity that we shall make the largest possible provision for the moral, intellectual and religious training and development of our people. This provision is largely found in keeping the ordinances of the Lord's house and the Lord's day. We have made a vow, and that vow is recorded in heaven, that we will meet together every first day of the week to break bread. To do otherwise—to show a good-natured imbecility of purpose—to drift helplessly along in the usages of the Old Baptists, conscious in our own hearts that this is not the ancient order of things, and having sternly demanded conformity to the apostolic order, at whatever sacrifice of peace, now to suffer our own brethren to travel on in the old ruts, rather than hazard the pain and trouble that will be the price of reform, would be a folly so inexcusable, a shame so unutterable, that the very stones might well cry out against us.
CHAPTER XXXV.
Professor William H. Whitsitt, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, at Louisville, Ky., has written a book that has for its leading feature to make it appear that the Disciples are an "offshoot from the Sandemanians."
The Sandemanians, like the Baptists, had both faults and virtues. They were one of the earliest sects of the Scotch Presbyterians to protest against a union of Church and State; they practiced a weekly breaking of the loaf; held to a plurality of elders in every church, and were exceptionally helpful to the poor; and surely, even Dr. Whitsitt will not call these damnable heresies. But they were also rigid separatists. They were Calvinists of the straitest sect, and made all their opinions a bond of union. In this they were like the Baptists, but essentially dissimilar to the Disciples. They exalted feet washing and the holy kiss into church ordinances, and excluded all who did not agree with them in these opinions, just as the Baptists exclude from the Lord's table all who are not of "our faith and order," though they admit that those persons thus excluded are regenerated, accepted of the Lord, and enjoy the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Differing from the Sandemanians in the most essential element of our plea, we hold a very remote relationship to them—that of fortieth cousin, perhaps. The Disciples are just as evidently an offshoot from the Baptists, as children are an offshoot from the parental stock.
Twenty years after the writer had begun his work in Kansas, he was able to count among fifty churches which had been organized within his knowledge, twenty-five that were dead; and there were six meeting-houses that were left unoccupied or sold for debt. And the church members would say to me: "We can neither preach, nor pray, nor read the Scriptures, nor break the loaf to edification, and we are too poor to hire a preacher. What shall we do?" They had no training, save that training they had obtained in the old Baptist churches, or one similar in our own, and now that they were scattered over the great West, and were poor in this world's goods, they were indeed in a pitiably helpless condition.