With these remarks, the subject of the day-line is dismissed with the conviction that the necessity of its existence, the fact that it must be found in the Pacific Ocean if anywhere, and the uniform recognition in practice, if not in theory, by all nations, of its location in that sea, unite in furnishing a combination of facts which render assurance justifiable in the mind of one who does not insist upon more testimony than he ought to demand.
There remain now but two matters in the article of the gentleman which need to be disposed of. These are found in the contemptuous sneer at the insignificance of the numbers of Sabbatarians, and the witticisms, if such they may be called, which are indulged in in the employment of the suggestion concerning the use of the sponges saturated with stupefying chemicals and the gratuitous trip around the world, which it is proposed to give them.
To answer these sallies to the satisfaction of some would be impossible, while with others, possessing the power of logical discrimination and knowing that the office of mere wit is most frequently that of diverting the attention from a course of reasoning which it is felt cannot be met, such an effort would be uncalled for. The paucity in numbers is the same old, threadbare objection which every great reform has been compelled to meet since the world began. While the administration of narcotics and the trip round the world would be just as fatal to the exact observer of the seventh part of time as it would to one celebrating a definite day, even though it were admitted that the consequences of such a journey would be as claimed by the writer.
But besides all this, it will be discovered that the basis of the whole transaction, both in the case of the sponge and the vessel, is fraud, deceit, and force. Stupefy a man with narcotics for twenty-four hours; or nail him down under the hatches of a circumnavigating vessel; break the compass; send him round the world; let the whole community conspire to falsify the facts in the case; do not let him know where he has been; falsify the truth regarding the day observed by first-day keepers; and then, forsooth, you have changed the practice, if not convinced the judgment, of a little handful of conscientious, definite Sabbath-day keepers. Wonderful, gentlemen! Wonderful in the extreme! What results for such prodigious efforts! Alas, for truth, when it must pass such an ordeal as this! We blush, but not for ourselves. We would almost be willing to inhale the anæsthetic or run the hazard of the voyage at sea, taking our chances respecting the proper preservation of the Heaven-appointed day of rest, if, by so doing, we might prevent our brethren of the Amendment school, for whose welfare we have the most earnest desire, from making so sorry a show of the low estimate which they place upon the importance of employing in a controversy like this, arguments which appeal only to the Christian’s head and heart, instead of those which appeal to the baser faculties of the mind.
A summary of the ground traveled in this rejoinder would run somewhat as follows:—
1. That in adopting the seventh-part-of-time theory, the gentleman has abandoned the definite first day which he sought to establish in the first nine of his articles.
2. That the seventh-part-of-time theory is just as fatal to the Sunday as it is to the Sabbath.
3. That it overturns the practicability of the proposed Amendment, since it seeks to enforce a definite day, and since, according to it, Sabbatarians have a Bible right to observe the seventh day in the exercise of a divinely given choice of days.
4. That it is possible to establish the identity of the last day of the week at the present time with that upon which God rested at the completion of the emotion; from the providential manner in which God pointed it out in the exodus from Egypt; the fact that Christ and his disciples kept the Sabbath according to the commandment; the general agreement among Jews, Christians, and heathen concerning its place in the week from that time to this.
5. That the objection concerning the conflict between a definite Sabbath and the laws of nature at the poles does not array the God of nature against himself, or our version of his commandment, since the trouble does not imply any want of foresight on the part of the Deity, but rather a disregard of the plainest teachings of both providence and nature on the part of those who have placed themselves where it was never designed that men should locate.