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
Let us briefly sum up the facts already fully brought to view. Christ
himself, after his resurrection, passed by the seventh day, and
repeatedly put special honor on the first day of the week. This same day
was honored by the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Spirit. Christian
congregations met for regular weekly service, not on the seventh day,
but on the first day of the week. The inspired apostle Paul pointedly
condemned the Judaizing teachers who insisted on the observance by
Christians of the seventh-day Sabbath. The early writers, companions of
the apostles, and others of the succeeding generations, bear the
clearest and most explicit testimony to the same facts—the
non-observance of the seventh-day Sabbath, and the stated meetings of
Christians for divine service on the first day of the week, the Lord’s
day. Now, if their theory is correct, how will the seventh-day
Sabbatarians explain the fact that Christ himself, the Holy Spirit,
inspired apostles, and Christian congregations all through the early
church, ignored the seventh day and honored the first? A general and
vague statement to the effect that an unwarranted change was made from
the original practice of the Christian church will not do here. Was not
the practice of the apostles and first organized congregations of
Christians the original practice of the Christian church? That practice
was, as we have seen, to observe the first day of the week. We repeat
what we have already proved at length, viz., that there is not an
instance in the Scriptures of the observance of the seventh day by any
Christian church, nor of any regard to that day, after Christ’s
resurrection, by apostles or their fellow-laborers, except as they
availed themselves, in their missionary work, of the meetings of Jewish
assemblies in Jewish places of worship. “An unwarranted change!” Let
those who take such language upon their lips consider that their charge
lies at the door of Christ and his Spirit, and the inspired apostles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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