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Almost Right

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Aug 12, 1909

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 86, No. 32.

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Almost Right

By F. M. W.

AMONG the excellent journals which come to our table, the Western Recorder is particularly frank and outspoken in its religious convictions. In its issue of July 15, it earnestly takes to task its Baptist brethren for using in their Sunday-schools “Moninger’s Manual,” which teaches that Easter should be observed in honor of the resurrection of Christ. To quote:—
The thing against which we enter our unqualified protest is the long ritual on the “observance of days.” . . . Paul said to the Galatians: “Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain.” Yet this “Manual” recommends the observance of twenty-four Sundays out of the fifty-two in the year to be set apart for special observance.
One of the Sundays to be specially observed, according to the “Manual,” is Easter Sunday. Regarding this the editor states:—
O, why will brethren go headlong toward Rome so heedless of consequences? Surely our Southern Baptists are not going to ape the Romanist in this fashion. The idea of leading our children astray by teaching them to observe this semipagan Romish festival! Baptists do not need to go to the heathen, nor to Rome, to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. We celebrate the resurrection every Lord’s day, by observing it instead of the old Jewish Sabbath. Especially do we celebrate this resurrection Scripturally and impressively every time we administer Scriptural baptism. “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also [raised] in the likeness of his resurrection.”
We agree with the Recorder that “we celebrate this resurrection Scripturally and impressively every time we administer Scriptural baptism.” This is clearly taught in the scripture the editor quotes, as well as in other texts which might be cited. But where is the Scriptural proof that the resurrection should be celebrated in the observance of Sunday? We have no such proof in the Bible. God gave one memorial of the resurrection, he had no need to give another. The Bible nowhere enjoins the religious observance of Sunday in any sense. It is an ordinary laboring day, the same as the other five common days of the week. Sunday observance must look to the same source for its authority as must the Easter festival. They are sister institutions, both possessing the same pagan mother and the same papal godmother.
Our Baptist brother is almost right, but he does not go quite far enough in his deductions and in the advice he proffers. In rejecting the authority of Rome as relates to the Easter festival, he should reject the same authority as pertains to the Sunday sabbath. Indeed, Rome sets forth the latter festival as the particular mark of her authority, which she boldly flaunts in the faces of Protestants, charging them with admitting her power to ordain as many feasts and holy days as she may choose, in that they observe the weekly rest day commanded by her.
Read her words as copied direct from “A Doctrinal Catechism,” page 174, published by the Catholic Publishing House of New York, and bearing the sanction of John Cardinal McCloskey:—
Question.—Have you any other way of proving that the church has power to institute festivals of precept?
Answer.—Had she not such power, she could not have done that in which all modern religionists agree with her, she could not have substituted the observance of Sunday, the first day of the week, for the observance of Saturday, the seventh day of the week, a change for which there is no Scriptural authority.
In “An Abridgment of the Christian Doctrine,” published by John Doyle in New York in 1833, and sent out under the approval of the Bishop of Boston, page 58, we read:—
Question.—How prove you that the church hath power to command feasts and holy days?
Answer.—By the very act of changing the Sabbath into Sunday, which Protestants allow of; and therefore they fondly contradict themselves, by keeping the Sunday strictly, and breaking most other feasts commanded by the same church.
Q.—How prove you that?
A.—Because by keeping Sunday, they acknowledge the church’s power to ordain feasts, and to command them under sin: and by not keeping the rest by her commanded, they again deny, in fact, the same power.
The denomination represented by the Recorder has stood for the right many times in their denominational history. They do well to-day that they stand against the spirit of ritualism, which is fast supplanting the simplicity of gospel worship in the great churches of the world. They do well to be wary of those influences and institutions which have been engrafted upon the Christian world by the Roman Church, but while they are rejecting one tradition of the “fathers,” and taking their stand for Bible truth, let them reject in toto the whole fabric of superstition and fallacy which has come down to us from the ages of degeneracy, and stand squarely on the Word of truth, which alone is able to build us up, and to present us faultless before the presence of His glory. Will Protestants of to-day be true to their profession, or does their name stand for a past experience, and for a faith succumbing to the insidious influences against which they should ever stand in consistent protest?
F. M. W.