Untitled article by W. C. O.

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, November 26, 1867

CONSISTENCY.

By W. C. O.

WE clip the following from the Voice of the West, thinking our readers will be interested to know that Eld. Preble has at least one endorser among his preaching brethren:

THE HOLY SABBATH.

Thank you, Bro. Himes, and the Lord too, for your frank and open avowal in your Journal of this week's Voice (October 23), of your faith in the first-day Sabbath. Glad you can, with me, call the Lord's day a “holy day.”

The Sabbath is a holy institution. Would to God our dear brethren would carefully and prayerfully examine this subject as we have done, and I am sure they would endorse our views, to the glory of God and the good of our perishing fellow-men. How I rejoice that my eyes have been opened to the truth of the holy Sabbath of the Lord. Once I was in bondage to the “seventh-day-of-the-week” theory; then, again, to the “no-holy-Sabbath-in-this-dispensation” theory! Now, praise to our Heavenly Father, I am free! I am happy in the truth. May many others soon come into the light and freedom of the gospel Sabbath—the holy Sabbath.—T. M. Preble.

We can also rejoice with Eld. P., in the “frank and open avowal” of Eld. Himes, in his faith in the first-day Sabbath. Not that we are pleased to see him established and confirmed in an error, but because an open avowal of his position must of necessity lead to more consistency in the columns of the Voice on the subject of the Sabbath.

Now, if the first-day Sabbath is a holy day, as Eld. H. declares, then those who are promulgating the no-Sabbath doctrine, are engaged in an unholy work, and should be sharply rebuked; and certainly Eld. H. ought to be qualified, by age and long experience, for this very work, so that when Eld. Sheldon or Mr. Bailey, or other no-Sabbath advocates, offer their contributions on this subject for the columns of the Voice, they should be indignantly spurned, and their authors told to engage in better business than tearing down the sanctity of the Sabbath institution. From this point we may expect, if not a retraction of what the Voice has said in endorsement of such work, at least a more consistent course of conduct in this particular.

And, seriously, let us ask Eld. P. and Eld. H., and all others who believe in first-day sanctity, if we who teach the observance of one day as holy, even although it be the seventh, are not engaged in better business than those who would do away with all Sabbath, and strike a death blow at the moral law of God?

Another reason why we rejoice in Eld. Himes' committal to this position is, that it must be encouraging to Eld. P. to have a little gleam of comfort in this direction, for if we are correctly informed, Eld. H. is the only Advent preacher of any note who has unqualifiedly endorsed Eld. Preble's book. Those who speak of it at all, are so exceedingly cautious in their approval that it must be anything but flattering to Eld. P., or conducive to the sale of his book.

We had hoped that it might be otherwise, for a general endorsement of this or any other position, would place our opponents on ground where we might know how to find them, and thus be enabled in meeting them to avoid striking in the dark. W. C. O.