TRY AGAIN, MR. BYERS

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, January 1, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 1

TRY AGAIN, MR. BYERS.

THE recent volume by Rev. D. B. Byers, “The Christian Sabbath, and the claims of Sabbatarians shown to be Untenable,” the absurdities of which were unveiled by Bro. Cottrell in Review No. 22, last volume, but which was spoken of by the Nashville Christian Advocate as a book that “was wanted,” and by the Northern Christian Advocate as a work that “must be written,” is annihilated by the N. Y. Independent of Dec. 18, 1879, in the following candid and discriminating paragraph. Whatever the position of the Independent may be on the Sabbath question, on the Sunday question it is certainly not far from the kingdom of God. It says:—

“As to the volume, The Christian Sabbath, and the claims of Sabbatarians shown to be Untenable, by the Rev. D. B. Byers (Cleveland: W. F. Schneider), Sabbatarians may continue to insist on the observance of the seventh day for all that this book contains. The fact that a circumnavigation of the earth makes a man’s Saturday his neighbor’s Friday, or his Sunday his neighbor’s Monday, does not destroy the monumental character of the day. His seventh day still remains to him the memorial of the rest from creation, or his first day the memorial of the resurrection. This confusion of reckoning bears just as hard against our author’s claim that the first day should be made the Sabbath as against the demand for the hallowing of the seventh. If there be, in fact, no such thing as seventh day or first day, if proportion of time be all the Sabbath law aims at, then it is as absurd to insist on the observance of the first day as to urge the keeping of the seventh, and the fourth day of the week or the sixth is as proper to be kept as either. So the charge of ‘legalism’ may be brought against those authors who claim that the first day should be hallowed as fairly as against the Sabbatarians. Nor is a ‘change in the day’ shown by the fact that Jesus rose and the apostles worshiped on the first day. These things may make the first day sacred; but how do they diminish the sanctity of the seventh? They may give an additional holy day, but how do they show that the former sacred day is no longer to be regarded as such? The writer overlooks the fact that the Apostolic Constitutions command the observance of both days, the seventh and the first, showing that they had no idea of such substitution. We should all have to go back to the observance of the seventh day if this book were all we had to defend us for not doing so.”