November 15, 1894
THIS number of the SENTINEL tells of Seventh-day Adventists imprisoned in Switzerland, and in this country, for doing bodily labor on Sunday.
WHY do Seventh-day Adventists suffer imprisonment rather than keep Sunday? Why do they not obey the civil laws which require them, in common with others, to refrain from the ordinary vocations of life on the first day of the week?
THE answer to the question raised in the preceding paragraph is that Adventists regard Sunday as a rival of the Sabbath of the Lord, and to honor it would be, with them, a denial of the Lord of the Sabbath. Sabbath-keeping is not with Adventists what it is with very many people, a mere matter of convenience, a simple choice of days, but it is a question of loyalty to God.
COURTS have denied that it is a matter of conscience with Adventists to work on Sunday, and have branded their devotion to their principles as obstinacy; but so did the Roman emperors the refusal of the early Christians to offer incense to Cesar. The Christians, they argued, were not forbidden to worship Jehovah; they were only required to honor the gods of Rome. It is the same to-day with the Seventh-day Adventists: they are not forbidden, say the courts “to keep their Sabbath; they are only required not to work on Sunday.”
BUT “no man can serve two masters.” God has set forth the Sabbath as the badge of his authority; it is his ensign: “Moreover also I have them my Sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them.” [147] To give like recognition to a rival sign would be the same as for soldiers to pay equal honors to the flag of their rightful sovereign and to that of a rebel prince; for that is just what the Sunday is, the badge of antichrist, the sign of sun worship anciently, and of papacy in modern times, and of rebellion against God and his law from the fall until the present moment. It is the “wild solar holiday of all pagan times,” and is to-day flaunted by Rome in the face of the world with the taunt that “by keeping Sunday, they acknowledge the church’s power to ordain feasts, and to command them under sin,” [148] and “the observance of Sunday by Protestants is an homage [worship] they pay, in spite of themselves, to the authority of the [Roman Catholic] Church.” [149]
ADVENTISTS can go to prison, or to death, if need be, but they cannot even seem to keep Sunday. [353]