The Sabbath question : Sunday observance and Sunday laws, a serman and two speeches

Preface

IT would not be presumptuous in me to infer from the diligence and ingenuity that have been used in publicly misrepresenting my position and course on the Sunday question, that the public have some interest in the matter. The object of this book, however, is, not to define my position, but to discuss the question, — a question in which the gravest interests are imperilled by untenable assumptions and arguments on both sides.

As to the misrepresentations that have been made, it is impossible to harbor serious resentment ; for they seem to have been devoid of malice. Great consideration is due toward that unhappy class of our fellow-citizens who have become bound, under inhuman and demoralizing contracts, to be funny once in every twenty-four hours, honestly if they can, but — to be funny. Morality cannot always approve the expedients to which they think themselves compelled to resort in the distressing exigencies of their toilsome business; but, even where morality condemns, humanity may pity and forgive.

The best part of this book is made up of the " Six Sermons " of my noble and saintly brother

George, whose opinions, in the main, I accept as my own. If critical readers of the book shall be charmed with the clear spiritual insight, the lucid argument, and the faultless beauty of expression which mark these, like all he ever wrote, and shall find what I have written to be rude and little worth in the comparison, I shall be better pleased than with any commendation they could pronounce upon me. I hope the republication of these "Six Sermons" will draw wider attention to the forthcoming memorial of his life and writings, of which we all, father and brothers, regret the long delay.

POSTSCRIPT.

Since the copy of this book was prepared for the press, two events have occurred to hinder the publication of it : first, the stereotype plates of the " Six Sermons " were found to have been destroyed ; and then, when arrangements to restore them had been completed, the sudden and serene departure of my father from the midst of his great labors for the kingdom of God on earth into the fulness of that " Sabbath-rest that remaineth for the people of God," interrupted the course of this business with its sorrow and its inexpressible joy and triumph.

LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.

Norwich, Conn., Feb. 22, 1882.

Contents

PAGE

A SERMON AND TWO SPEECHES.

BY LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.

II. Six Sermons On The Sabbath Question

BY GEORGE BLAGDEN BACON.

PAGE i. The Sabbath of God. Preached Feb. 23, 1868 . 105

2. The Purpose of the Jewish Sabbath. Preached

3. The Use and Abuse of the Jewish Sabbath.

Preached March 8, 1868 147

4. The Lord's Day a Privilege. Preached March

22, 1868 173

5. The Lord's Day Honorable. Preached March 29,

1868 204

6. The Right Observance of the Lord's Day.

Preached April 5, 1868 231

A SERMON AND TWO SPEECHES.

By LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.

SUNDAY OBSERVANCE AND SUNDAY LAWS.

PERSONAL DUTY CONCERNING SUNDAY OBSERVANCE.

SERMON TO THE PARK CHURCH, NORWICH, SEPTEMBER, 1879.

THE question, What is a Christian man's duty concerning the observance of the Lord's Day ? is just now in the worst position into which a question of personal duty can possibly fall. It is in a position of vagueness and doubt. Men are not fully persuaded in their own minds about it, one way or the other. Consequently they are continually in the way of being tempted to do that which they suspect, or half suspect, to be wrong, or that which they are not quite sure to be right. When so tempted, most men yield to the temptation ;

io Sunday Observance and Sunday Laws,

and, so yielding, they wound their own consciences and condemn their own souls. The conscience of the Christian Church amongst us is becoming miserably demoralized and broken down by this condition of things ; and nothing can bring it back to a healthy tone, except a thorough clearing up of the intellect on the subject.

I do this generation no injustice in saying that the notions of duty on this subject that are current in Christian circles are not founded on intelligent, conscientious, personal study of the will of God concerning it. The opinions of our fathers, whether they were right or wrong, were so founded ; and they held them clearly and firmly, and honored them by consistent practice. They were fully persuaded in their own minds. And we are persuaded in their minds, and not in our own. We have accepted their conclusions in a matter-ofcourse way, as a sort of tradition of the elders, taking for granted that it must be right ; and, when we are suddenly confronted with a different view, we are first a little shocked, and then a little shaken in mind, and then, some of us, a little censorious upon the wickedness of people that do not come up to our standard, and a little self-satisfied and vainglorious over our superior virtue ; and, the rest of us, a little disposed to relax somewhat in our practice, with a feeling that we are not quite certain that it is wrong, or, if wrong, not certain that it is so very wrong. It is a wretched condition of the conscience and life, growing out of a poor, low condition of the intellect, which is vague and hazy and fluctuating on one of those questions of personal duty on which every man ought to be fully persuaded in his own mind.

One consequence of this traditionary way of dealing with the question of duty — this taking the law from one another, instead of taking it directly from the word of God — is, that " the good and acceptable and perfect will of God " becomes encumbered, as it was in the days of the Pharisees, by a system of conventionalities, written or unwritten, underneath which the law of God is quite lost out of sight. And naturally enough, when we come to comparing these conventional standards, the most rigorous will

1 2 Sunday Obsei'vance and Sunday Laws.

seem to be the most virtuous ; so that by and by the rule of duty generally professed will be some impossible code of ascetic requirements, like that in the Westminster Catechism,1 which demands that the whole day be devoted to unintermitted acts of spiritual meditation and religious worship, and condemns every word and thought that departs from spiritual topics, as a sin. A most disastrous thing, in the long run, is this refinement and improvement on the law of God. Some high and worthy souls will try to discipline themselves to such sustained spiritual flights, and with many a helpless fall, and many an hour of anxiety and self-reproach, will strive more and more for the attainment of that ideal, and with some measure of success. Others, holding still to the same rule of duty, give up the thought of conforming their conduct to it, and subject their whole lives to the shame and bondage of a willing, conscious, habitual short-coming.

1 "The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days, and spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy."

Others, still, consider that, however doubtful they may be themselves about the traditionary rules of Sabbath observance, and however little they may conform to them in private, nevertheless the traditionary ideas on this subject are very salutary, and it is best to keep them up, as far as may be, by an outward show or sham of conformity. And, finally, there are others, and they are pitifully many, who find the regulations so imposed irksome, not to say impossible, and in violent and wicked rebellion cast off all cords of restraint, and declare that they don't care for God's law, and that they will do their own pleasure, whether God be for them or against them. Oh, there is a dreadful account of human sin, both open and hypocritical, both in the days of the Pharisees and in our own days, to be imputed to the setting up of a system of conventionalities, instead of the law of God, in the matter of the observance of the day of rest !

Now, instead of attempting to maintain and enforce the Sabbath of New England tradition, or the Sabbath of the Presbyterian Catechism, by culling " proof-texts " in support of them, I propose to go behind all traditions and prepossessions, and study the matter direct from the Holy Scriptures themselves.

I. The first thing, the last thing, the one thing, in all the Scriptures most conspicuous concerning the Sabbath day, — so conspicuous that almost every thing else concerning it is unimportant in the comparison, — is, that it is to be a day of rest. This is the meaning of the word Sabbath-day, — it means the rest-day. On the seventh day — the seventh cycle or creative period — God rested, and blessed (consecrated) the seventh day of every week for human rest from human toil. This is the main, primary object and ordinance of the day ; and in all the law and the prophets there is no other ordinance distinctly given regarding it. Every one — high and low, householder and servant, even the very cattle, every one — is to knock off work, and rest. So it says in Genesis. So it says again in Exodus, and in Numbers, and over again in Deuteronomy, and yet again in Nehemiah, and in many of the prophets. This was the public law of the land, as well as the law of each man's conscience before God. And it was enforced too. One Sabbath morning, while the people were still under martial law in the desert encampment, a man openly undertook to defy the law, and to make issue with the government on this point of obedience to the law of the weekly rest. His challenge to the government was accepted on the spot, and he was executed as if for treason to the law. And this was right. If punishment is ever right for any thing, it is right in its uttermost severity in the case of one who openly defies the law and the government, even if it is on a matter of gathering sticks, or a matter of firing balls at a bit of. bunting. And the government that cannot, or dare not, or will not, deal with the open defiance of its authority, is a decaying and dying government ; and such a government was not that of the Hebrew wanderers in the wilderness. When the law said, there shall be no work, but general rest, throughout the camp, the law meant what it said.

It meant what it said. That is really (if I may tell you one of the secrets of theological science), that is really the key to the mysteries of biblical interpretation, — that the Bible means what it says. Now, in regard to this fourth commandment, there is a strong impression that in some mysterious way it means something that it does not say. What it says is so simple, — that on the seventh day they shall knock off work, and rest, — surely it cannot mean so simple a thing as that ! There is, I suspect, an impression on some minds, that, if they could get at the original Hebrew, they could extort more of a meaning out of it than that, — that men were just to knock off work, and rest. But I think the Hebrew is as plain as the English.

But is not more than this meant when it is commanded to " sanctify " the Sabbath day, or "keep it holy"? I think not, and I will tell you why. First, as I judge, the meaning of the opening words of the commandment are to be interpreted by the words that follow; and, thus interpreted, they mean that the day is to be kept sacred from the intrusion of labor. Secondly, the meaning of these words is to be judged from the whole course of divine instruction and requirement concerning the Sabbath day ; and that is directed simply and exclusively to this one point of abstinence from labor. Thirdly, it is to be judged by common sense ; and this excludes the idea, that to keep the Sabbath holy was to "spend all the time in worship : " for no ordinary mind, not one in a hundred, — not one in a hundred thousand, — is capable of sustained acts of worship twenty -four hours, or twelve hours, or six hours, in continuance; and this commandment was not given to extraordinary minds, such as go to make up a Westminster Assembly of theologians, but to mankind at large, and primarily to a very unspiritual part of mankind, — to a clan of freedmen just come forth from the house of bondage.

"But is that all that the commandment requires ? " The question is put sometimes in that spirit of Naaman the Syrian, which cannot believe that God would command a simple, easy, happy thing, — a spirit which has misconstrued God's word on more vital matters than this matter of the rest-day. " Is that all ? "

Well, is not that enough to begin on ? Had you not better wait till you have learned to fulfil this plain and easy injunction, before you go on to look for some more recondite and weighty meaning ? Do you fulfil it ? There is no scandal about your deportment. You would be offended and pained to see your neighbor, whose daily work is done with a spade or a grocer's wagon, going about it of a Sunday morning. But your work is done with your head : and when you carry your six days' work over into the seventh, and instead of taking the happy repose which is your privilege and duty, and your privilege because it is your duty, you are busy, in your place in church, or as you sit with the religious newspaper on your lap, maturing business combinations, getting a complicated bargain into the right shape, calculating a new turn in politics, or threading the intricacies of a lawsuit, and all this without any visible sign of it on your countenance, — why, there is no one to be disturbed or scandalized by it ; but it is in distinct, diametric disagreement with this commandment, both in its letter and in its spirit, — far more clearly so than if you were to take your hoe into your flower-garden, or drag your lawnmower across the turf ; for these are not your work, but your recreation. Every thing is done with perfect decorum and stillness, when you take your hard six days' head-work over into the seventh ; but it does not the less suffer the retributions which, in the course of nature, overtake the violations of a commandment that is contained not less in the principles of physiology than in the beneficent written law.

But is not the Sabbath ordained for worship ? No, not primarily ; but for repose and refreshment. Only once in the multitude of commands concerning the Sabbath day, is mention made of " a holy convocation : " l the Hebrew ritual also made some distinction between the seventh-day ceremonies and those of other days.2 But the law and meaning of the day are given in the fourth commandment in its two varying forms, 3 and they are perfectly clear. Nevertheless, worship and the study of God's will did grow to be a beautiful and con-

1 Lev. xxiii. 2, 3. 2 Num. xxviii. 9 ; Lev. xxiv. 8, stant incident of the day of rest. As the scenes of public history move swiftly by us in the early books of the Old Testament, we get here and there a glimpse of domestic life, and among these the picture of a godly family saddling its beasts to go to the prophet's house.1 Once or twice in the Psalms 2 we seem to hear a burst of Sabbath worship ; and at last, after the return from exile, we find the synagogue, the type of the Christian church, wherein " Moses is preached every Sabbath day," 3 grown into universal acceptance. And all this, not by ordinance, but all the more to the honor of God and his church because it is without ordinance — the native growth of a willing worship upon a divinely given rest-day.

2. Such was the use of the Sabbatic law under the Old Testament. What were the abuses and perversions of it, the pages of the Four Gospels repeatedly show. That spirit to which I have already alluded as infecting, not Jewish only, but Christian interpretations of

Scripture, could not be content with the plain and simple thing which the Scripture said, but must needs superinduce upon it new meaning's by construction and inference ; thus devising new prohibitions, and thereby inventing new temptations and new sins, — a most perilous and pernicious business. " Carrying a bed ! " said they, when they saw one that had been sick of the palsy. " Nay, verily ; that is transportation. If a bed, why not all your household furniture ? Where can you draw the line ? Rubbing out corn in the hands ! what is that but a form of threshing? and killing a flea is tantamount to hunting. And if one were to climb a tree, and thereby break a twig of it, he might as well have chopped wood all day." Of course, under this sort of interpretation, the suffering or imposing of the worst annoyances was a mark of the highest virtue. The ascetic treatment of the day transformed it from a privilege into a slavish burden. There was no point on which Pharisaism so bitterly attacked the conduct of Jesus ; none on which his protest against the Pharisees, as making void the law which they pretended to guard, was more pointed. His contention against them was, not that the Mosaic Sabbath was an intolerable burden, but that the intolerable burden which they bound on men's shoulders was not the Mosaic Sabbath, but a travesty of it. These artificial austerities, not only were they not required, they were forbidden by the whole genius of the day.

Thus the clear meaning of the ancient law is confirmed by the authority of Jesus Christ in his rebuke of current misinterpretations. The object of the Sabbath law was plain enough. Other blessings were incidental to it. A whole system of useful religious observances had grown up around it. But the primary object of the institution was rest, — that each one should rest himself, and allow all others to rest This was the law. Christ did not attempt to modify it. He restored it wherein it had been made void by misinterpretation. The Sabbath, he said, was not an end, but a means to an end. The Sabbath law was a law of universal rest ; but it was enacted for the benefit of mankind, and is therefore to be held subordinate to human wants and necessities. In short, he laid down the principle that is incorporated into our own legislation on the day of rest, — that suspension of labor is not to be exacted in case of works of necessity or mercy. But he did not change the character of the Hebrew festival, or add any new commandment to that which made it a day of personal and public repose. The ordinance that "all the time be spent in acts of public or private worship " is not found in the Old Testament or in the New, but in the acts of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. It does not appear that he whom, alone of men, we call our Lord, spent his Sabbaths in that way. In fact, the contrary appears at that dinner-party of a chief Pharisee, at which he was a conspicuous guest.

But now let us come closer to the personal, practical question which concerns and sometimes perplexes you and me. The question is, not what was the duty of a faithful Hebrew respecting the seventh day of the week, but what is the duty of an American Christian concerning the first day. And that, let us plainly acknowledge, is not to be denned by the letter of the law of Moses. We are not under the law, but under grace. We do not pretend to follow the letter of the fourth commandment. We have even conspicuously and quite unnecessarily departed from the letter of it at a point on which the commandment insists with great emphasis, alleging it as containing the very reason of the commandment. The commandment says, Keep the seventh day sacred to repose, because on the seventh day the Lord your God rested from the labors of the creation. We say, No : we will keep the first day of the week for other reasons. And when the Seventh Day Baptists reproach us with this unfaithfulness to the law which we profess so punctiliously to observe, we have really very little to say for ourselves ; and so we generally turn them off with some poor little joke : for the most of an argument that I remember to have heard against the Seventh Day Baptists, was the one which used to be rehearsed once a year by the Professor of Astronomy at Yale College, when, at a certain point in his lectures, he advised them all to sail around the world to the eastward, and so gain a day in their reckoning, and they would come back all right, and quite like other people. The day doesn't matter (we say with a fine and lofty contempt), so long as it is one day in seven. The day does matter, says the fourth commandment ; and it shall be the seventh day, for such and such a reason. The day does matter, said the early Christians ; and we decide, not to keep the seventh day, but the first, for such and such another reason. The very ground of the change was, that it did make a difference which day was observed, and that the difference was worth making. And it has this noble instruction for us, if only we have ears and hearts to receive it, that the laws of commandments contained in ordinances — the formulas, "touch not, taste not, handle not, which perish in the using " — are not a sufficient measure and gauge of the Christian's duty. Every Lord's Day that we gather for worship in the midst of the general calm and silence of a public rest is a declaration at the same time of our loyalty to the spirit of the law, and of our freedom from its letter. It is a sign that we have taken, not a lower and laxer standard of duty, but a higher, — the law interpreted by the spirit of grateful love.

Applying, now, this standard to the practical and personal questions of duty touching the Lord's Day, we find that : —

I. Some of these questions may be eliminated at once, as being settled by other considerations.

1. Many questions on which we ask for light from the fourth commandment are fully decided for us under the fifth, by the law of the household of which we are members, by the known wish of the father and mother whom we honor and obey.

2. Other questions may be settled for us in like manner by the civil law to which we owe allegiance, and which limits us in our liberty of deciding and acting at certain points.

3. Duty to the church — the community of the fellow-Christians among whom we live — may often be a consideration that shall justly decide questions of duty concerning the day of rest, quite independently of their intrinsic merits. The fact that this line of argument is so often exaggerated and overstrained in our time must not lead us to forget that it is a legitimate and authoritative line of argument.

II. But setting aside all such questions, thankful to be relieved of them, there will still keep coming back to us questions of Lord's Day observance to be decided squarely and directly. What can I say that shall be helpful to you to reach a right conclusion on them ?

I cannot but think that my personal experience has prepared me in some degree to advise upon this subject ; for the question has been forced upon my decision in circumstances in which no one of these outside considerations could come in to make weight, — in countries where there was neither public sentiment, nor Christian feeling, nor civil law, nor filial duty, to help decide. I have always been glad, for myself and my family, that I was led to keep the same quiet, religious, and family Sunday in Germany and Switzerland that I had learned to keep here in New England. And however difficult, at times, it was, I believe still that it was the right thing, the incomparably best thing, for me and my children. I do not ask you to accept my rule. I invite no man to judge me concerning holy days, and I myself judge no man. Be persuaded each in your own mind. But ponder well the principle which I commend to you, the axiom which cannot be wrong, that in this, as in all things else, you are bound before God to do the very best thing, and nothing but the best.

I seem to hear the answer coming back with a sigh from burdened hearts, " It is only a new way of saying the old thing. To do the very best, and nothing but the best, what can this mean but to impose upon us the strain of twelve or fifteen hours of incessant religious exercises, — the yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear ? "

To which I have only to say, that, if it is true that this is the best, then you are bound to it. And if your relaxation of this rule means that you give up trying to do your best in God's service, and mean to do only your second-best, then are you condemned in that which you allow. But it is not true. The history of your individual conscience, as well as the history of society, proves that this exaggeration of the law of God is neither for his glory nor for the good of his human creatures. We must go behind this "tradition of the elders" for the true rule of a Christian man's duty on the Lord's Day.

1. We find it in the words of the ancient law, — the law of rest, — rest of body and mind. How strangely good people sometimes miss it ! Often, passing Sunday away from home, I have heard my hosts confess, with half a blush, that they were guilty of having a late breakfast Sunday morning. And oftener still I have heard some of those bustling, stir-about Christians, whom we have all met with, claiming, with much complacency, that his Sunday was the hardest day of all the week to him, — that what with church-going, and Sunday schools, and prayer-meetings, and street-preaching, and all, he got up earlier, worked harder, and went to bed wearier, than any other day, — all which may be right, but it is not resting.

2. Do I need to say that it ought to be the glory of the Lord's Day in a Christian family that it is the home-day ? This is one of the pleasant things in the remembrance of our Sundays abroad, — the great processions of the baby-wagons on every public promenade and pleasant country-road. There were sights and sounds of demoralizing carousal on the one hand, and of enforced drudgery on the other hand ; but the pleasant family groups about the baby-wagons were among the good things left to them of a day of rest.

It does seem as if sometimes amongst us a false notion of the sanctity of the day was suffered to hinder our sanctifying it by holy uses of family duty and affection. If ever old age, or sickness, or pining loneliness, are suffered to lack the enlivening of your visit, because you hold the day too holy for Sunday calls, the wrong is almost identical with that of those whom our Lord rebuked, who would say to their parents, " Corban — it is consecrated to holy uses — that which should have gone to your comfort and support." *

3. Let a systematic part of your Sabbath

1 Mark vii. 11 ; Matt, xv, 5.

service be the doing of works of mercy. " Pure religious worship, and undefiled before God and the Father is this : To visit the fatherless and widow in their affliction, and to keep yourselves unspotted from the world." Pre-eminently is the Lord's Day the day for the deacons and deaconesses of the church to be busy on their official errands to the poor.

4. Finally, among the duties of the Christian Sabbath are public worship and instruction. I name them last, because, to those who spend the day in the spirit of these suggestions, there will be no need of enjoining them at all as a duty. They will come of themselves. They were not named in the original law of the Sabbath, but see how naturally and universally they came to be used ; so that in Paul's day, as in ours, wherever there were Jews, there was a synagogue, and in it preaching and worship every Sabbath day.1 If you keep this day to the Lord as a day of rest, of home comfort, of good works to the poor and the sick, I have no concern at all but that you will use it, in due proportion, for direct acts