Читать книгу The Constitutional Amendment: or, The Sunday, the Sabbath, the Change, and Restitution - Wolcott H. Littlejohn - Страница 6

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Where, then, shall we turn for relief? There is one, and but one, more chance.

Acknowledging that the law, as originally given, will not answer the purpose, and that its amendment cannot be made out with sufficient clearness to warrant the taking of a stand upon it, we turn, for the last time, to examine a position quite generally advanced; namely, that of Sunday observance inaugurated, justified, and enforced, by the resurrection and example of Christ. Is it true, then, that such is the fact? Have we, at last, found relief from all our difficulties in the life and career of no less a personage than the divine Son of God? Let us see.

The point of the argument is briefly this:—

Our Lord—by rising from the dead, and by his practice of meeting with his disciples on that day—both introduced, and made obligatory upon his followers, the necessity of distinguishing between the first and the remaining days of the week, as we would between the sacred and the profane. Now, if this be a case which can be clearly made out, then we are immediately relieved in one particular; that is, we have found authority for the observance of the Sunday. But how is it as it regards the seventh day? This, we have seen, was commanded by God the Father. The obligation of that command is still recognized. Now, consequently, if Christ the Son has, upon his own authority, introduced another day immediately following the seventh, and clothed it with divine honors, is it a necessary inference that the former is therefore set aside? To our mind, it is far from being such. If God has a law for the observance of a given day, and Christ has furnished us with an example for that of another also, then the necessary conclusion is, that the first must be kept out of respect for God the Father, and the last through reverence to Christ the Son. Three facts, therefore, must be clearly made out, or our situation is indeed one of perplexity.

First, it must be shown, authoritatively, that the resurrection effected the change which is urged, and that the practice of Christ was what it is claimed to have been.

Second, that that practice was designed to be exemplary; in other words, that what he did in these particulars was of a nature such that we are required to imitate it.

Third, it must also be shown that he not only sanctified the first, but, also, that he secularized the seventh day of the week.

But can this be done? Let us see. First, then, we will consider the matter of the resurrection. Now, that it was an event of surpassing glory, and one ever to be held in grateful remembrance, there is no room for dispute among Christians. But shall we, therefore, decide that it must of necessity be commemorated by a day of rest? This would be assuming a great deal. It seems to us that it would be better, far better, to leave decisions of such importance as this entirely with the Holy Spirit. Protestants, at least, warned by the example of Roman Catholics, should avoid the danger of attempting to administer in the matter of designating holy days; since, manifestly, this is alone the province of God. Hence, we inquire, Has the Holy Ghost ever said that the resurrection of Christ imparted a holy character to the day upon which it occurred? The answer must, undeniably, be in the negative. No such declaration is found in the Holy Word. Nor is this all; even from the stand-point of human reason, every analogy is against it. It were fitting that, when God had closed the work of creation, and ceased to labor, he should appoint a day in commemoration of that rest. The propriety of such a course, all can see. But, on the contrary, is it not equally manifest that to have remained inactive on that glorious morning, when the Son of God had burst the bands of death, and the news was flying through all parts of the great city of Jerusalem, “Jesus has risen to life again,” would have been a condition of things wholly out of the question? Both the enemies and the friends of Christ—the one class stimulated by hate, and the other released by the mighty power of God from the overwhelming gloom and crushing despondency of three terrible days—were, by the very necessities of the case, moved to action by an energy which would cause them to overleap every barrier and to break away from every restraint. Everything, everywhere, animated by the new aspect which affairs had suddenly assumed, demanded immediate, ceaseless, and untiring activity. And such it had. From the early morning, until far into the hours of the succeeding night, scribe and Pharisee, priest and Levite, believer and unbeliever, were hearing, gathering, and distributing, all that could be learned of this most mysterious event. We say, consequently, that so far is it from being true that the day of the resurrection is one which should be hallowed, either exactly or substantially as that of the decalogue, the very opposite is the fact; and, if it were to be celebrated at all, every consideration of fitness demands that it should be done by excessive demonstrations of outward and uncontrolled joy, rather than by quietude and restraint.

Passing now to the other branches of the subject, we inquire, finally, What was there in the example of Christ and the apostles which in any way affects the question? If they are to be quoted at all upon this subject, it is but reasonable that their history should be examined with reference both to the seventh and the first day; for, if precedent, and not positive enactment, is to be the rule by which our faith is to be decided, in a point of this significance, it is at least presumable that the historic transactions by which this question is to be determined will be ample in number, and of a nature to meet and explain all the phases of the subject. That is, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles—covering, as their history does, a period of about thirty years—will afford numerous and conclusive evidences that both Christ and the apostles did actually dishonor the old, and invest with peculiar dignity and authority the new, Sabbath. First, we inquire then, Is there, in all the New Testament, the record of a single instance in which Jesus or his followers transacted, upon the seventh day of the week, matters incompatible with the notion of its original and continued sanctity? The answer is, of necessity, in the negative. The most careful and protracted search has failed to produce a single case in which the son of Joseph and Mary departed in this particular from the usages of his nation, or in which his immediate representatives, during the period of their canonical history, failed to follow, in the most scrupulous manner, the example of Him of whom it is said that, “as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up for to read.” (Luke 4:16.) Nor is this all; it is a remarkable fact, and one well calculated to stagger the investigator at the very threshold of his researches into the data for the modern view, that, whereas the Sabbath is mentioned fifty-six times in the New Testament, it is in every instance, save one (where it refers to the annual Sabbaths of the Jews), applied to the last day of the week. So far, therefore, as the negative argument is concerned, which was based upon the presumption that the claims of the old day were constructively annulled by the appointment of a new one, its force is entirely broken by the record, which, as we have seen, instead of proving such an abolition, is rather suggestive of the perpetuity of the old order of things. Hence, we turn to the positive side of the subject.

How do we know that Christ ever designed that his example should produce in our minds the conviction that he had withdrawn his regard from the day of his Father’s rest, and placed it upon that of his own resurrection? Did he, in laying the foundation for the new institution—as in the case of the Lord’s supper—inaugurate the same by his own action, and then say to his disciples, As oft as ye do this, do it in remembrance of me? Did he ever explain to any individual that his especial object in meeting with his followers on the evenings of the first and second Sundays (?) after his return from the dead was designed to inspire in the minds of future believers the conviction that those hours, from that time forward, had been consecrated to a religious use? If so, the record is very imperfect, in that it failed to hand down to us a most significant fact. I say significant, because, without such a declaration, the minds of common men, such as made up the rank and file of the immediate followers of Christ, were hardly competent to the subtile task of drawing, unaided, such nice distinctions. How natural, how easy, by a single word, to have put all doubt to rest, and to have given to future ages a foundation, broad and deep, upon which to ground the argument for the change.

But this, as we have already seen, was not done! and after the lapse of eighteen hundred years, men—in the stress of a situation which renders it necessary that they should obtain divine sanction, in order to the perpetuity of a favored institution—are ringing the changes of an endless variety of conjectures drawn from transactions, which, in the record itself, were mentioned as possessing no peculiar characteristics, which should in any way affect the mere time upon which they occurred.

Let us, therefore, with a proper sense of the modesty with which we should ever enter upon the task of deciding upon the institutions of the church, when there is no divine precept for the guidance of our judgment, examine for ourselves. As we do this, it will be well, also, to bear in mind the fact that our prejudices will be very likely to lie entirely upon the side of life-long practice and traditionary inheritance. In fact, nearly every consideration, political, financial, and social, will be found, if not guarded with the strictest care, wooing us to a decision which—though it might dishonor God, and do violence to the principles of a clear, natural logic—would exempt us, individually, from personal sacrifice and pecuniary loss.