The Constitutional Amendment: or, The Sunday, the Sabbath, the Change, and Restitution: A discussion between W. H. Littlejohn, Seventh-day Adventist, and the editor of the Christian Statesman — John Shaqi
The Constitutional Amendment: or, The Sunday, the Sabbath, the Change, and Restitution: A discussion between W. H. Littlejohn, Seventh-day Adventist, and the editor of the Christian StatesmanLittlejohn, Wolcott H.
Religion
The Constitutional Amendment: or, The Sunday, the Sabbath, the Change, and Restitution: A discussion between W. H. Littlejohn, Seventh-day Adventist, and the editor of the Christian Statesman
Littlejohn, Wolcott H.
Sabbath; Seventh-Day Adventists -- Doctrinal and controversial works; Sunday; Sunday legislation -- United States
Nor is this all; behind all this pretentious claim for an amended law
are very many indications of a wide-spread conviction—though undefined
and hardly recognized by the individuals themselves—that the fact upon
which they place so much stress is, after all, one in regard to which
there are serious doubts in their own minds. As an illustration of this,
we have but to call attention to two things. First, on each Lord’s day,
so-called, thousands of congregations—after devoutly listening to the
reading of the fourth commandment of the decalogue, word for word,
syllable for syllable, letter for letter, precisely as it was written
upon the table of stone by the finger of God—are in the habit of
responding with solemn cadence to the utterances of the preacher, “O
Lord, incline our hearts to keep this law.” Now this prayer means
something, or nothing. It is either an expression of desire, on the part
of those employing it, for grace to enable them rightly to observe the
commandment as it reads—seventh day and all—or else it is a solemn
mockery, which must inevitably provoke the wrath of Heaven. These
people, therefore, judging from the most charitable stand-point, are
witnesses—unconscious though they may be of the fact—of a generally
pervading opinion that the verbiage of the fourth commandment has not
been changed, and that it is as a whole as binding as ever. Second, nor
is it simply true that those only who have a liturgy have committed
themselves to this idea. It is astonishing to what extent it has crept
into creeds, confessions of faith, church disciplines, and documents of
a like nature. But among the most striking of all evidences of its
universality, when properly understood, is the practice of nearly all
religious denominations of printing, for general distribution among the
Sunday-school scholars, verbatim copies of the decalogue, as given in
the twentieth chapter of Exodus. Yet this practice would be a pernicious
one, and worthy of the most severe censure, as calculated to lead astray
and deceive the minds of the young, if it were really true that this
code, in at least one very important particular, failed to meet the
facts in the case, as it regards present duty.
In view of these considerations, a change of the base of operations
becomes indispensable. A commandment, altered in its expressions so as
to vary its import, and yet no one acquainted with the exact terms in
which it is at present couched—and all, in reality, being so skeptical
upon the point that even its most ardent advocates reason as if it had
never occurred—would certainly furnish a foundation altogether
insufficient for the mighty superstructure of a great reform, which
proposes, ere the accomplishment of its mission, to revolutionize the
State.
ARTICLE III.
Where, then, shall we turn for relief? There is one, and but one, more
chance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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