1. According to the prophet, what was to be the attitude of Christ toward His Father’s law?
“The Lord is well pleased for His righteousness’ sake; He will magnify the law, and make it more honorable,” Isaiah 42:21.
2. According to Christ, would any part of the law be done away?
“For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled,” Matthew 5:18.
NOTE: Since we find the heaven and earth here yet, we are compelled to admit that the law of God is yet binding upon the human family, and according to Christ, it will be so long as the heaven and earth are here. These words are in accordance with the prophet when he said, “He will magnify the law and make it honorable,”
3. In connection with the four universal empires as they are pictured to us by the prophet Daniel, what power would arise?
“I considered the horns and behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots; and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things,” Daniel 7:8.
4. What would be one part of the work this power would carry out?
“I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them,” verse 21.
NOTE: This power is recognized to be the Papacy, or Rome in its Papal form. The Papacy truly made war on the people of God to the extent of nearly sixty million suffered death in all ways possible for them to be put to death.
5. What other noted work would this power think to do?
“And he shall speak great words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and think to change times and laws; and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time,” verse 25.
6. What power claims to have changed the law of God?
Answer: The Papacy.
7. What part of the law of God has the Papacy thought to change?
Answer: The fourth, or Sabbath commandment.
NOTE: This power has thought to change a commandment given by God Himself, and one that Christ said would last so long as the heavens and the earth were here.
8. By whom, and in what year do we find the first Sunday law of history? Answer: By Constantine, and in the year 321 A.D.
9. What does the Encyclopedia Britannica say of the first Sunday law?
“The earliest recognition of the observance of Sunday as a legal duty is a constitution of Constantine in 321 A.D., enacting that all courts of justice, inhabitants of towns, and workshops were to be at rest on Sunday (venerable day of the sun) with an exception in favor of those engaged in agricultural labor,” Encyclopedia Britannica, art. Sunday.
10. What do other works say of the same power, and its relation to the institution of Sunday as a rest day?
“Constantine the Great made a law for the whole empire (A.D. 321) that Sunday should be kept as a day of rest in all cities and towns; but he allowed the country people to follow their work,” Encyclopedia American, art. Sabbath.
11. What did Constantine’s law require?
“Let all judges and town people, and the occupation of all trades rest on the venerable day of the sun; but let all those who are situated in the country, freely and at full liberty attend to the business of agriculture; because it often happens that no other day is so fit for sowing corn and planting vines; lest, the critical moment being let slip, men should lose the commodities granted by Heaven.”
12. Does the Papacy acknowledge that it has changed the Sabbath?
Answer: It does.
“Question: How prove you that the church hath power to command feasts and holy days?”
“Answer: By the very act of changing the Sabbath into Sunday, which protestants allow of; and therefore they fondly contradict themselves by keeping Sunday strictly, and breaking most other feast days commanded by the same church,” Abridgment of Christian Doctrine, by Rev. Henry Tuberville, D.D., of Douay College, France (1649), page 58.
“Question: Have you any other way of proving that the church has power to institute festivals of precept?”
“Answer: Had she not such power, she could not have done that in which all modern religionists agree with her, she could not have substituted the observance of Sunday, the first day of the week, for the observance of Saturday, the seventh day, a change for which there is no scriptural authority,” A Doctrinal Catechism, by Stephen Keenan, page 174.
The Catholic Church of its own infallible authority created Sunday a holy day to take the place of the Sabbath of the old law. Kansas City Catholic, February 9, 1893.
“The Catholic Church . . . by virtue of her divine mission, changed the day from Saturday to Sunday,” Catholic Mirror, Official organ of Cardinal Gibbons, September 23, 1893.
“Question: Which is the Sabbath day?”
“Answer: Saturday is the Sabbath day,”
“Question: Why do we observe Sunday instead of Saturday?”
“Answer: We observe Sunday instead of Saturday because the Catholic Church, in the Council of Laodicea (A.D. 336) transferred the solemnity from Saturday to Sunday,” The Converts Catechism of Catholic Doctrine, by Peter Gelermann, C. SS. R., page 50, third edition, 1913, a work which received the “apostolic blessing’ of Pope Pius X, January 25, 1910.
What was done at the council of Laodicea was but one of the steps by which the change of the Sabbath was effected. This we learn to be a fact from the standpoint of their own works as well as from other sources.
13. Do Catholic authorities acknowledge that there is no command in the Bible for the sanctification of Sunday?
Answer: They do.
NOTE: “You may read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and you will not find a single line authorizing the sanctification of Sunday. The Scriptures enforce the religious observance of Saturday, a day which we never sanctify,” _ Cardinal Gibbons, in The Faith of Our Fathers, edition 1892, page 111.
“Sunday is a Catholic institution, and its claims to observance can be defended only on Catholic principles . . . . From beginning to end of Scripture there is not a single passage that warrants the transfer of weekly public worship from the last day of the week to the first,” Catholic Press (Sydney, Australia), August 25, 1900.
14. Do Protestant writers acknowledge the same thing?
Answer: They do.
NOTE: “Is there no express commandment for observing the first day of the week as Sabbath, instead of the seventh day? _ None whatever. Neither Christ, nor His apostles, nor the first Christians celebrated the first day of the week instead of the seventh as the Sabbath,” _ New York Weekly Tribune, May 24, 1900.
“The Scriptures nowhere call the first day of the week the Sabbath . . . There is no Scriptural authority for so doing, nor of course any Scriptural obligation,” _ The Watchman (Baptist).
“The observance of the first instead of the seventh day rests on the testimony of the church, and the church alone,” _ Hobart Church News (Episcopalian), July 2, 1894.
15. How did this change in observance of days come about, suddenly or gradually?
Answer: Gradually.
NOTE: “The Christian church made no formal, but a gradual and almost unconscious transfer of the one to the other,”–The Voice From Sinai, by Archdeacon F.W. Farrar, page 167.
This of itself is evidence that there was no divine command for the change of the Sabbath.
16. For how long a time was the seventh day Sabbath observed in the Christian church?
Answer: For many centuries. In fact, its observance has never wholly ceased in the Christian church.
NOTE: Mr. Morer, a learned clergyman of the Church of England, says: “The primitive Christians had a great veneration for the Sabbath, and spent the day in devotion and sermons. And it is not to be doubted that they derived this practice from the apostles themselves,” _ Dialogues on the Lord’s Day, page 189.
Prof E. Brerwood, of Gresham College, London (Episcopal), says: “The Sabbath was religiously observed in the Eastern church three hundred years and more after our Savior’s passion,” _ Learned Treatise of the Sabbath, page 77.
The historian Socrates, who wrote about the middle of the fifth century, says: “Almost all the churches throughout the world celebrate the sacred mysteries on the Sabbath of every week, yet the Christians of Alexandria and at Rome, on account of some ancient tradition, refused to do this,” _ Ecclesiastical History, book 5, chapter 22.
Sozomen, a historian of the same period, writes: “The people of Constantinople, and of several other cities, assembled together on the Sabbath as well as on the next day; which custom is never observed from Rome,” Ecclesiastical History, book 7, chapter 19.
All this would have been inconceivable and impossible had there been a divine command given for the change of the Sabbath. The last two quotations also show that Rome led in the apostasy and in the change of the Sabbath.
17. What do Catholics say of the observance of Sunday by Protestants?
“It was the Catholic Church which, by the authority of Jesus Christ, has transferred this rest to the Sunday in remembrance of the resurrection of our Lord. Thus the observance of Sunday by the Protestants is an homage they pay, in spite of themselves, to the authority of the Catholic Church,” Plain Talk About Protestantism of Today, by Mgr. Segur, page 213.
18. What kind of worship does the Savior call that which is not according to God’s commandments?
“But in vain they do worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men,” Matthew 15:9.
The seventh day this book defends,
And to the searching mind it lends
A helping hand, to learn the way,
Which is to keep God’s Sabbath day.
For when the six days’ work was done,
And all was finished ‘neath the sun,
The Lord Himself was pleased to rest;
And hence the seventh day He blest.
The first that dawned o’er all the land,
Just fresh from the Creator’s hand,
The Sabbath law God therefore laid,
The Sabbath day for man was made.
The seventh day the Lord hath blest,
And said that in it we should rest,
Can we despise His holy day,
And from His Sabbath turn away?
God’s memorial then we’ll keep,
And thus remember His great work,
His ten commandments we can’t obey,
Unless we keep the seventh day.
_ J. A. Nugent