Manchester Sunday Exhibition Sparks Religious Controversy

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, January 8, 1880

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 2

Manchester Sunday Exhibition Sparks Religious Controversy

Everywhere the religious world is significantly in trouble over the Sunday question. In Manchester, Eng., the Council of the Royal Institution have thrown open their exhibition of painting and statuary to the public free, for several hours on each Sunday afternoon; and the Presbyterian ministers of that city have adopted a resolution condemnatory of the conduct of the Council as “a violation of the divine sanctity” of the Lord’s day. We learn these facts from the Manchester (Eng.) Weekly Times of Nov. 15, 1879, a copy of which has just been shown us. A long letter in that issue of the paper discusses the subject and handles the Sunday institution with ungloved hands. Although it unfortunately takes no-Sabbath ground, it nevertheless reminds its readers of a fact which the world is fast learning (and this is what troubles the churchmen so), that the idea of a change of the Sabbath to the first day of the week finds no support whatever in the Bible; that there is no divine command for Sunday observance; and that, in the language of the writer, “Our Sunday in its ecclesiastical character, is a church institution, the offspring of tradition.”