The Future of the Sabbath Question

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · May 5, 1885

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 62, No. 18

The Future of the Sabbath Question.

Evidence is every day accumulating that the question is destined to agitate more and more the public mind, till it becomes the leading question in the political as well as in the religious world. The Christian Statesman of April 23, remarks:—

“Whoever would understand the most important forces now working in nominally Christian nations must study carefully the movements affecting the popular observance and the legal safety of the Lord’s day [Sunday]. The present confused and broken state of opinion and practice on this subject cannot continue. Either the secular spirit will carry communities that are called Christian away into a practical abandonment of the day, or we shall have a reformation.”

The difficulty under which the Sunday question is unconsciously revealed in these words, opinion and practice is broken and divided on the subject. Why?—Because there is not a particle of proof for the institution; hence there is no standard to which to appeal to regulate men’s opinions and practices in this matter. There is no way in which the trouble can be remedied, and to this it will come: Put through some enactment on the subject; and then by rack and thumb-screw crush the consciences of men into conformity, as the papal church did during the Dark Ages.