The Constitutional Amendment: or, The Sunday, the Sabbath, the Change, and Restitution / A discussion between W. H. Littlejohn, Seventh-day Adventist, and the editor of the Christian Statesman

by Wolcott H. Littlejohn

If, indeed, you are sincere in believing that Sabbatarians violate no divine law in the keeping of the seventh day, then we say to you in the name of charity, Why not allow them, so long as they are Christian men and women, and obedient citizens, to carry out their convictions of duty, without compelling them, by the appliances of persecuting legislation, to keep the particular first-day Sabbath which indeed you have chosen for yourselves, but for which you have now ceased to claim any special divine honor? To form them, either to disregard their own convictions of duty, or to keep two days holy, would lie an act of despotism but one remove from that terrible bigotry which, in the Inquisition, resorted to the rack and the thumbscrew; not, indeed, to make men better Christians or better citizens, but to coerce them into the acceptance of institutions for which there was no divine authority.

But we must pans to the consideration of other points. To the objection that the seventh day may have been lost since creation, and that he is a bold man who would affirm his ability to locate it now, it may be replied that, while Sabbatarians claim for themselves no unusual amount of courage, they do insist that it is an easy matter to demonstrate the succession of weeks, and the proper place of the original seventh day in the septenary cycle at the present time. The way in which this may be done is as follows: At the creation of the world, God blessed and sanctified the seventh day, because that on it he had rested. At the exodus from Egypt, he gave to the people a written law, enforcing the Sabbatic observance of the day on which he had originally ceased from his labors. On the sixth, Moses said to the people, “To-morrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord.” For forty years subsequent to this, God marked out this day from the others by causing that no manna should fall upon it whatever, whereas it fell upon every other one of the seven.

Thus we have the authority of God himself, who assuredly could not mistake, that the people of Israel, in the outset, had committed to them the original seventh day, since God not only gave them a Sabbath, but also, according to the reason of the commandment, the Sabbath of the Lord. Descending the line of history to the days of Christ, we find him declaring that he had kept his Father’s commandments (John 15:10). But one of these commandments was that relating to the Sabbath; in order, therefore, to the proper observance of it, Christ must have been able to decide which day in the week it was. That this was the case, none will dispute. Thus the day is located in his time satisfactorily, since he kept the same one which the Jews regarded, and which preceded the day of his resurrection. From that time to this, we have the general agreement of Jews, Christians, and heathen, in regard to the precise place in the week of both the first and the seventh day. Surely, this is all which could be demanded in order to reach reasonable certainty.

The difficulty which the gentleman finds in harmonizing the will of God, as expressed in the law of nature and that of a definite Sabbath for the people living near the poles, is apparently possessed of some force. It is, however, not peculiar to him. These barren wastes of ice and snow, though far removed from our civilization, are apparently destined to figure as largely in the spiritual world as they do in that of scientific research; not only on the Sabbath question, but also in that of baptism, it has a part to act. Think, says the advocate of sprinkling, as a shudder runs through his whole system, think of an immersion administered in the regions of eternal ice. Then having suitably impressed his auditors with the physical difficulties in the way of Bible baptism, he concludes that God never could have ordained immersion as the only method, since it is impracticable in the extreme north, and God surely would have commanded a form of ordinance which could be carried out in all parts of the world.

In harmony with this line of deduction is the difficulty stated by our friend. Chiming in with the theory that the laws of nature and the law of God must run harmoniously together, it is shown that at the poles the days and nights are six months long; and, therefore, that a twenty-four hour Sabbath, definitely located upon the last day of the week, is out of the questions. The conclusion drawn is that, as the theory of the seventh-day Sabbatarians is in conflict with the ordinance of nature in these portions of the globe, it must be contrary to the original design of God.

But pause a moment; suppose we should grant that in the region in question there are men who cannot keep the seventh-day Sabbath as originally ordained, does that prove of necessity that it ought not to be hallowed in those portions of the world where there is no difficulty in the way of its observance? We think not. To illustrate: Were a man to pass his life in a coal mine, hundreds of feet beneath the surface, laboring continually, and never seeing the sun at all, would he, therefore, be exempted from the definite Sabbath? You answer, No. But why is this reply returned? Manifestly, because the difficulty is not with God and Isis laws, or the sun, but with the individual who has voluntarily placed himself under abnormal circumstances. In other words, he has located himself where the God of nature never designed that he should, and, in so doing, he has himself created a difficulty which he himself can remove.

So, too, with the Northman. If he finds it impossible to keep a Sabbath which is most perfectly adapted to the wants of mankind, it is simply because he has placed himself in a region which God has doctored waste and uninhabitable as emphatically as can be done by nature speaking through the language of eternal ice and snow, and the disappearance for six months in a year of that great luminary whose light and heat are so indispensable to the comfort and advancement of the race. But, if this is true, then the argument from the conflict between the law of the God of nature and that of revelation, concerning a definite day of rest, loses all of its force; for the whole trouble arises, not from any want of adaptation on the part of such a rest to the circumstances of those who are where God would have them located, but from a disregard, in the first place, on the part of the nations in question, of the manifest law of prohibition to the settlement of regions which were designed to remain unoccupied.

Their relief can be found in one of two directions: They can, in the interest of their own progress, retrace their steps to localities where the more advanced portion of the race feel the genial influence of a diurnal sun; or, should they insist upon remaining in the bleak regions of their choice, it is possible for them, according to the accounts of travelers, to mark by the variations of the twilight, even in their six months’ night, the boundaries of the Sabbath and the week days as they come and go to those residing in more temperate regions.

It is now time to grapple with the theory that it is impossible for those traveling around the world and those living in different portions of it to keep one and the same day. The first thing to be settled is the matter of what is meant by the expression, “the same day.” Upon this point, the gentleman has wasted many words. We have never insisted upon the identical hours. All that we demand is that the mine day should be observed throughout the habitable globe, i. e., each individual should celebrate in his own particular locality the seventh day of the week as it comes to him in its passage round the earth—to use the language of common parlance.

Whether this can be done or not is a question which involves the wisdom of God; for, granting that he gave the fourth commandment as a Sabbath law, and the regulations concerning the Sabbath, as found in the books of Moses, there is no room for dispute that he understood the statute to enforce the keeping of a definite day, and not merely one-seventh part of time, In the sixteenth chapter of Exodus, where the Sabbath is first introduced, is found an excellent opportunity to test this matter. He there marks out the day which he had hallowed as the one which followed the sixth, and the only one on which no manna fell. For forty years, also, this practice of separating the day of his rest by a weekly miracle from all others was continued. But why should he have done this if there was no choice, and if the keeping of the seventh part of time was all that was necessary? Nay, more, why did he make it absolutely impossible for a man to celebrate any other day but the seventh day of the week? That he did so, we can prove in a few words.