It is, of course, one of the cardinal principles of Protestantism—in fact, its sole raison d’être—that “the
Bible is the only rule of faith and practice”; that everything therein commanded should be performed literally; and that whatever has no clear and direct warrant of Scripture is purely of man’s device, and, by consequence, of no authority whatsoever. All very fine, in words; but when we examine how the doctrine works in point of fact, we shall find an amazingly great discrepancy between the expressed faith and the actual, tangible practice. There has certainly been no considerable drain upon the reservoirs of our large cities in carrying out the injunction that “if ye wash not one another’s feet, ye have no part in me.” It is not, so far as we are informed, peculiarly characteristic of any sect of Protestants, when “smitten on one cheek,” immediately to “turn the other” for a repetition of the blow. No special alacrity has ever been shown, even by the straitest sects, in eager obedience to the command, “From him that borroweth from thee, turn not thou away”; and so far are they from obeying the absolute injunction of the Apostle James to “call in the priests of the church to the sick,” and to “anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord,” that they rave and rage against Catholics for doing so, and affirm it to be a superstitious observance. If St. Paul ever expressed himself clearly on any point, he certainly does so most unmistakably when he says that “it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church”; yet the sectarian world is now very largely supplied with “reverend” ladies, widowed, married, and maiden, who evangelize with great acceptance, and even officiate as regular pastors to various congregations throughout the country. It would seem, therefore, that the cardinal principle aforesaid
must have either disappeared or some ingenious mode have been discovered by which it works only when wanted, to be set aside whenever its admission would run counter to the whim which may happen to be in vogue.
Now, the only texts of the New Testament that mention the Sunday in such way that it would be possible to draw from them any inference in regard to its observance are Acts xx. 7 and 1 Cor. xiv.. 1, neither of which declares the abolition of the ancient Sabbath or enjoins the observance of Sunday. But notwithstanding this fact, Protestants at large have accepted our Sunday, whether on tradition, which they reject; or on the authority of the church, which they despise; or, finally, of their own good pleasure—certainly not on Scripture, since it is not instituted therein. It is hardly worth while, owing to their paucity, to mention as exceptions the Sabbatarians, who maintain that Christians have no authorization for changing the divine institution of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently observe Saturday. Luther does not pretend any divine authority for the change, but takes for granted that “mankind needs a rest of one day, at least, in seven; and the first day, or Sunday, having prescription in its favor, ought not lightly to be changed.” He says elsewhere that “if any man sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to labor on it, to ride or dance on it, or to do anything whatever on it that shall remove its infringements on Christian liberty.” The Augsburg Confession pointedly says: “Those who judge that in place of the Sabbath the Lord’s day was instituted, as a day necessarily to be observed, do very grossly err.” Calvin says in
his Institutes: “It matters not what day we celebrate, so that we meet together for the desirable weekly worship; there is no absolute precept”; and he adds that the sticklers for Sunday are “thrice worse in their crass and carnal view of religion than the Jews whom Isaias (ch. i. 13) denounced.” The doctrine of the English Reformers on the subject is most concisely and strikingly put by Tyndale, who, in his Answer to Sir Thomas More, thus speaks:
“As for the Sabbath, we be lords over the Sabbath, and may yet change it into Monday, or into any other day, ass we see need, or may make every tenth day holy day, only ass we see cause why. We may make two every week, if it were expedient and one not enough to teach the people. Neither was there any cause to change it from Saturday, but to put a difference between ourselves and the Jews; neither need we any holy day at all, if the people might be taught without it.”
Even in Scotland John Knox, who attached himself to the innovators with a bigoted zeal, did not pretend to find any Gospel warrant for what he was pleased to call the Sabbath; and Dr. Hessey candidly acknowledges that the strained sabbatarianism of Scotland is by no means to be attributed to him or his coadjutors, mentioning at the same time that Knox, when on a visit to Calvin at Geneva, found that eminent Reformer occupied, on the Sunday of his arrival, at a game of bowls! If, then, it be plain that the arch-innovators are not responsible for that peculiarly unlovely, rigid, and ultra-Judaic observance of the Sunday (the traces of which, growing fainter year by year, are yet plainly discernible in the laws, institutions, habits, and manners of the English-speaking portion of the Protestant world), whence did
it originate? Why are the ideas of English-speaking Protestants so widely different from those of their brethren, and even of their own founders, on this subject?
Fuller (in whose pages much quaint and naïve information about the history of those transition days is to be found) tells us that the Puritans, “who first began to be called by that name about 1564,” and who dissented from the church of King Henry on the ground that the Reformation had not gone “far enough,” were, like all other renegades, anxious to distinguish themselves by hostility at every point to the camp they had abandoned. They preached that to throw bowls on the Sabbath “were as great sin as to kill a man”; to make a feast or wedding dinner on that day “were as vile sin as for a father to cut the throat of his son with a knife”; and that to ring more bells than one “were mickle sin as is murder.” Of this brood was Vincent Bownde, whose great work on the Observance of the Sabbath first appeared in 1595; and to this book, which began the polemical controversy on the subject, is due the rabid sabbatarianism of the English Puritans during the remainder of the reign of Elizabeth and the dynasty of the Stuarts. The Scottish Calvinists eagerly seized the cry, and from both sects (their influence, pertinacity, and numbers being much greater than those of the Anglican Establishment, which was itself, of necessity, largely tinctured by their practice), through our own hard-headed but harder-hearted Puritans of New England, who practised this unmitigating observance of the day with the same zeal of enforcement that they displayed in many other grimly ludicrous things, we of this age and
country are still to a great extent under the sway of an intolerant and enforced sabbatarianism which the spread of intelligence and liberality is gradually wearing away, but which, after all, dies very hard. Just as no enmity is so envenomed, no hatred so intense, so in like manner no distinctive practice or usage disappears so slowly, as those originally engendered by religious faction. It was clear that no Scriptural authority existed for the abrogation of the Jewish Sabbath, and equally evident that the denial of the authority of the church destroyed for ever all ecclesiastical sanction for Sunday. There remained, consequently, no possible authorization for it but to insist that the mere meeting together of the apostles on that day (which, so far as anything to the contrary can be shown from Scripture, might have been accidental) constituted sufficient warrant; and next to regulate the observance of the day by the practice of the Jews with regard to the Sabbath. This Bownde did without hesitation. His book, gratifying as it did at once the malignity of the Puritans against the church, their envy of the established sect, and their own exclusiveness, became exceedingly popular, was largely read and quoted, and its influence remains to the present day. Here in the United States we yet retain traces of it in our laws; as, indeed, we still do of that other intolerance by which Catholics were, in former days, not allowed to hold civil office. In some of the New England States Sunday (or Sabbath, as they wrong-headedly insist on calling it) begins at sunset on Saturday; but in most of them it legally begins at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, lasting twenty-four hours. In some States contracts made on that day are