Notes on the Sabbath
1. I do not believe that the Jewish Sabbath is binding on Christians, but I believe that the Creational idea of the Sabbath is unchangeable.
2. By the Creational Sabbath I mean the seventh-day rest. When, in this discourse, I speak of stealing God’s time I mean stealing the seventh day of rest, be it Sunday or Saturday, Monday or Thursday.
3. Christians can have no doubt as to choice of day. That is determined for them. They want no other. It is Resurrection day. They would as soon change a birthday as change the Lord’s Day.
4. The Sabbath controversy can never be settled by references to Judaism, or by references to anything of the nature of mere usage, apostolic or patristic. It is the hea7-t that remembers the elect day, and it is the heart alone that can “keep” it. Christian obedience is a sacrifice of love and Joy, without one particle of mere legalism, or one link of bondage. We cannot keep the Sabbath because we are comtnanded to do it, but because we long for it with all the eager expectancy of love.
5. What wonder if Christians are unwilling even to appear to de-sanctify the day? I do not use the strong word “desecrate,” for it is not the mtention of many free-Sabbatarians to do anything so violent. Christians have what to them are the tenderest reasons for preserving and hallowing the day of Christ; not only have they an argument, they have also an emotion to direct their policy. Even if their logic could be answered, their sentiment would be indestructible.
6. I believe it would be perfectly possible to open museums and galleries of art on Sunday without doing injury of a social kind in thousands of instances. But Christians as such, who really reverence the day because of its distinctively Christian memories, can never promote such opening. As citizens and as reformers of some kinds of social abuses, they may not hinder the introduction of any healthy competiti’m as against taverns and places of dissipation, but as Christians they can ‘>ever consent to fall below the level of the day’s one great meaning -the triumph and the joy of their Lord’s Resurrection.