Tracts on the Sabbath

by Unknown

10. If it be downright disobedience to set about our work on the seventh day, when God says, "in it thou shalt NOT do any work," can we think to make amends for this act of disobedience by ceasing from work on another day? Even the performance of a required duty will not make amends for another one neglected. How much less, then, the performance of something which is not required! "Who hath required this at your hand?"

11. Has God ever taken away the blessing which he once put upon the seventh day, and made that day a common or secular day?

12. Does not the reason of the blessing (See Quest. 3,) possess all the cogency now that it ever did? Has it lost force by the lapse of time? And while the reason of an institution remains, does not the institution itself remain?

13. Was the reason of the blessing which God originally put upon the seventh day, founded upon any need that men then had of a Redeemer? Was it therefore to receive its accomplishment and fulfillment by the actual coming of the Redeemer? In what possible sense can it be said, that Jesus Christ fulfilled and made an end of this reason?

14. Has God ever said of the first day of the week, In it thou shalt not do any work? Has Christ ever said so? Have the apostles?

15. Is there any scriptural proof that Christ, or his apostles, or the Christian churches in the days of the apostles, refrained from labor on the first day of the week?

16. As there is no transgression where there is no law, (Rom. 4:15; John 3:4,) what sin is committed by working on the first day of the week?

17. Does not the Sabbatic Institution RESULT from the blessing and sanctifying of a particular day? Is not this the very thing in which it consists? How then is the institution separable from the day thus "blessed and sanctified"? How can it be separated from that upon which its very existence depends?

18. If the very life and soul of the institution consist in the blessing which was once put upon a particular day, is it not idle to talk of the transfer of the institution to another day? If another day has been sanctified and blessed, then it is an entirely new institution, and not a transfer of the old.

19. Does not the law of the Sabbath require the weekly commemoration of that rest which God entered into after he had finished the work of creation? By what principle of law or logic, then, can that law be made to require the commemoration of the work of redemption?