We have changed the Sabbath from the seventh to the first day in the
week. It gives me a sublime idea of our Sabbath, that by some great,
silent alteration, it has come to pass that all the world keep the day
of Christ's resurrection, instead of the day which commemorated the work
of creation. I feel toward it as I do with regard to the noiseless
changes of the seasons, and the conformity of our habits and practices
to them. I left New York late in winter for the Azores, and, before I
expected it, the warm southern airs came one morning into my cabin
window. So the Christian Sabbath, with its beautiful associations,
flowed in upon the world without a formal proclamation. I feel thankful
to God for so regarding our intelligent natures, as to leave some
things, relating to ordinances, modes, and forms, to be inferred,
bringing great changes over the moral and spiritual world, and leaving
us to adjust ourselves and the administration of the appointed
ordinances to them. We can add nothing, we take nothing away from an
express, divine command; but, as the first disciples were left to infer
that a Sabbath was as necessary after Christ brought in the new creation
as before, and adjusted it to the celebration of the Saviour's rising
from the dead, so we infer that God's covenant with believing parents
for their children is as desirable now as ever; that all the original
reasons for it now exist; and, therefore, we take the initiating
ordinance of religion now, as the church in former ages did, and apply
it to the children. All church-members did it before Christ; all
church-members may do it now. God saw fit to make every adult member, at
least, of the Jewish family, a church-member; if he has changed and
restricted the terms of church-membership now, that is a sufficient
reason for not making the sealing of children as universal now as it was
before. That is to say, in both cases, it is a church-member's
privilege.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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