THE one leading object of the “Christian Endeavor” work for 1897, is to make universal the observance of Sunday as the Sabbath, and instead of the Sabbath. And this is to be accomplished by whatever means can be employed.
In performing its part in the business, the Christian Endeavorer begins its campaign for the year, by booming a fraud. The Endeavorer declares this fraud to be the greatest discovery since Columbus discovered this Continent—“As important in theology as the discovery of America was in geography.”
This “great discovery,” this fraud in fact, is that the Sabbath of the Lord, the Sabbath of the fourth commandment, was not the seventh day, but “occurred on fixed dates like one’s birth-day or the fourth of July.” And yet they call it the “weekly Sabbath”! Henceforth then all the people may expect Independence Day to occur, and may prepare to celebrate it, weekly on the fourth of July throughout the year; their birth-days likewise may be celebrated weekly throughout the year. That is a great discovery. And it is as plain as A B C that it is as great a fraud as it is a great discovery.
Yet the Christian Endeavorer actually booms this thing as so great a truth that among other great things to be accomplished by it the Endeavorer “trusts” that “The Jews throughout the world … will be led to observe Sunday.”
This is a great thing of course, and so are some of the other things “trusted” for by the Endeavorer; but the greatest of all, the thing that brings most satisfaction to the soul of the Endeavorer, the thing that makes it fairly leap for joy, is the halorious fact that by this dismal fiction “The Seventh-day Adventists are left without any standing whatever;” and “The Seventh-day Adventists will simply have no reason for existence.” How great indeed must be the Seventh-day Adventists in the view of the Christian Endeavorer, when a thing that is hoped to leave them “without any standing whatever,” and without any reason for existence, deserves to be boomed as the greatest discovery of ages! If the Seventh-day Adventists are really so important an element as this, we hardly expect them to be put out of existence by this fraud, gigantic as it may be.