IN DEFENSE OF THE FAITH
The
Truth About Seventh-day Adventists
A
REPLY TO CANRIGHT
by
William
H. Branson
10. THE SABBATH ON A ROUND
WORLD
MR. CANRIGHT the
Baptist raises the old objection to the seventh-day Sabbath, that it
cannot possibly be
kept on a round world.
Concerning this, he says:
The stubborn facts
nearer home show that God's children do not, and cannot, all 'observe
the same period
together.' Everybody
knows that it is Saturday in India some twelve hours sooner than it is
here, and that it
is Saturday here twelve
hours after it has ceased to be Saturday there. In Australia the day
begins eighteen
hours sooner than it
does in California. So the seventh-day brethren in California are
working nearly the
whole time that their
brethren in Australia are keeping Sabbath! Come even nearer home than
that. The sun
sets about three hours
later in California than it does in Maine. So when the Seventh-day
Adventists in
Maine begin to keep the
Sabbath at sunset Friday evening, their own brethren in California,
where the sun
is yet three hours
high, will still be at work for three hours! So, very few of them on
this earth, 'observe the
same period together.'
While some of them are keeping Sabbath on one part of the Earth, others
of them are
at work on another part
of the earth.' Seventh-day Adventism Renounced, p. 174.
So there we have it.
The world being round, it is impossible to obey God's law in respect
to the Sabbath, says
Mr. Canright. Strange that God should have made a Sabbath for a world
which He
knew to be round, isn't
it? But there is a still stranger thing. That is, that this very same
identical earth that
is so round, and which
rotates so fast that one cannot possibly keep the Sabbath, presents no
difficulties
whatever to the person
who desires to keep Sunday! This we also are taught by Mr. Canright, for
in the
same chapter in which
he attempts to prove that on account of the earth's being a globe the
Sabbath cannot
be kept, he confidently
informs us that Sunday can be kept. Note his teaching on this point:
Under the new
dispensation of the gospel, other circumstances have arisen plainly and
grandly marking
another day as the
all-important day in Christian memory-the resurrection day.' Ibid., p.
176.
He further says:
The essential idea
is that we should devote one day in seven to religious duties. To secure
the highest
good, all should unite
in observing the same day. From the days of the apostles the Christian
church has,
with one consent,
observed the day on which Jesus rose from the dead, the first day of the
week, or Sunday.
-Ibid., p. 181.
He explains that the
difficulty about keeping the Sabbath is the existence of a day
line, and that this
jumps about so from
place to place that there is no possible means of fixing the day of
the original
Sabbath. - Ibid.,
p. 184.
Surely this reasoning
is more profound than enlightening. Just how it is that Saturday cannot
possibly be
kept on a round world,
but Sunday can be, is, to say the least, a bit confusing. Does he
perhaps mean that
on Sunday the earth
flattens out, and thus the difficulty is overcome for the day, and that
it then resumes its
globular form until the
next Sunday rolls around? Or does the day line stay fixed on Sunday, so
that the
particular day can be
located, and move about only on Saturday, making it impossible for that
day to be
found? In any event,
there is evidently no difficulty experienced in locating Sunday in any
part of the Earth,
for, according to Mr.
Canright, from the days of e apostles the Christian church has, with
one consent,
served the day on which
Jesus rose from the dead, the first day of the week, or Sunday.
From the days of the
apostles. This covers a period of nineteen hundred years. And, says
he, during this
period Britains have
kept Sunday. They have done it, he claims, 'With one consent, that
is, Christians in
America, Europe,
Australia, China, wherever they have been found during these nineteen
hundred years,
have all agreed on the
question of which day was Sunday. They have done it with one
consent, with no
mix-up over a round
world, a day line, lost time, or any of these scary hobgoblins; they all
agree that
Sunday, the definite
day upon which our Lord was raised, can be found, yea, has been found,
and is
everywhere known. Upon
this all have been agreed for nineteen hundred years; and yet, would you
believe
it? The seventh can
neither be found nor kept! The world is too round. Time keeping has not
been accurate
enough. Day lines move
about so. The north and south poles present serious obstacles; and there
are so
many reasons-not the
least of which is the fact that men invent such arguments for the press
purpose of
getting rid of a plain
command of God with which their lives are not in harmony.
Surely this kind of
reasoning answers itself. What candid person would say that Sunday can
be
kept on a round world
that has a day line, but that Saturday cannot? What advantage could one
day possibly
have over another this
respect?
Seventh-day Adventists
have never claimed that the Sabbath could be kept in all parts of the
world
at the same moment of
time. They may be illiterate, as Mr. Canright tries to make them appear,
but their
ignorance does not
quite reach to the point where they fail to recognize that each day of
the week travels
around the earth, and
that the Sabbath therefore does not come to people in all places at
once, and therefore
cannot be kept by all
people at the same time. What they do claim is that wherever one may be,
in the
Orient or Occident, he
can keep exactly the same day as his fellow Christians keep on the other
side of the
world, but his keeping
of the day must be at the time when the day comes to him, and has no
relation to the
question as to when it
comes to those in other countries.
When God made the
Sabbath, He made it for a round world, and made the sun to rule the
day.
Genesis 1:16.
Therefore, as an obedient child of God, it is my duty to keep the day
when in the divine order
it comes to me, without
finding fault with God's arrangement.
As has been pointed
out, Seventh-day Adventists have missions and missionaries in almost
every
land of earth, the
Land of the Midnight Sun not excepted, and never yet have we heard
from one of them
or from their converts
any complaint about not being able to find the Sabbath because the world
is round,
or for any other
reason. Sabbath keepers are in no difficulty on this point. The
difficulty, when it arises, is
always in the mind of
someone who desires to oppose and discredit the Sabbath, and never in
the mind of
one who desires to keep
it.
THE DATE LINE, OR DAY LINE
Discussing the
so-called lost-time question and the date line, in an article in Present
Truth, published in
Washington, D.C., in
its issue of July 15, 1926, Mr. C. P. Bollman, associate editor of that
periodical, said:
Considerable dust
has been thrown, in the study of this subject, by introducing the
question of the date
line, which the
Standard Dictionary (article, 'Date;' subtitle, 'Date Line') defines
thus:
'An imaginary line
fixed upon as the point where the reckoning of the calendar day changes:
in
nautical practice, he
meridional line 180' from Greenwich, but practically running through
Bering Strait and
irregularly through the
Pacific Ocean. East of this line the day is dated one day earlier than
on the west of
it.'
This location of the
day line, or date line, is not an arbitrary human arrangement, as might
at first
thought seem to be the
case. Its establishment in the Pacific Ocean was clearly due to the
position of the
continents and the
divine plan for peopling the earth. It is conceded by all that Asia as
the cradle of the
race. Spreading
naturally from their original home, the children of men carried the day
and week with them
to the eastern confines
of Asia, and to adjacent islands. But even before this was accomplished,
the course
of empire had begun to
run toward the west, and so continued until the westward and higher tide
of
settlement and of
civilization met the conservatism of the East in the Pacific Ocean. Thus
God by His
providence established
the date line in the only place possible, all things considered. Man did
not establish,
but simply discovered,
this line in the place where the Creator by His providence had put it
when He made
the world and formed
man upon it.
Technical questions
as to the identity of the week and of the weekly Sabbath are never
raised,
except as an excuse for
not obeying the fourth commandment just as it reads, 'The seventh day is
the
Sabbath.' Nobody has
any difficulty 'in identifying any day -of either the month or the week
in ,any part of
the earth, except the
seventh day.
Large bodies of
Christians, as the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, etc.,
emphasize
just as strongly the
importance of keeping the definite first day of the week, as do the
Sabbatarians the
obligation to observe
the definite, identical seventh day. Such technical questions are
raised, not because of
practical difficulties
encountered in identifying the Sabbath in any part of the world, but
only when an
excuse is sought for
not complying with the plain and explicit terms of the fourth
commandment. The
question is not only an
impeachment of the intelligence of the great majority of both first-day
and seventhday
observers, but
infinitely worse yet, it charges the Almighty Himself with folly in
giving to the race a
commandment that in its
very nature could not be obeyed. All the other days can be clearly
defined, but the
Creator's memorial of
His finished work is so illusive, some would have us believe, that it
cannot be
identified!
The fact is that not
the Jews only, but the whole world, in the providence of God, have the
weekly cycle, to which
no reasonable or probable origin can be assigned other than the Mosaic
and other
ancient and similar
accounts of creation. The Creator says in His law: 'Remember the Sabbath
day, to keep
it holy. . . . The
seventh day is the Sabbath.' Ex. 20:8-11.
LOST TIME
Speaking to the
question of a proposed thirteen-month calendar, in the House of
Representatives, June 11,
1929, Mr. Sol Bloom, a
member from New York City, said this concerning the possibility of
losing or
gaining time in travel:
When we speak of
losing or gaining a day in travel, we are really giving a new definition
of the
word. We are defining
days, not in terms of the journey of the earth on its axis, but rather
in terms of the
journey of human beings
around the earth, which is quite a different thing. The trouble, of
course, grows
out of the fact that
the traveler moves from the given point at which he began to measure the
day. If days be
defined in terms of
man's journey around the earth, without making allowance for his
changing point of
measurement, then the
most unbelievable possibilities arise.
Let us imagine an
airplane capable of travelling a thousand miles an hour. A man starts
westward in such
a plane at noon Sunday.
The sun is always overhead, because he travels westward at the same rate
as the
sun. Twenty-four hours
later that is, on Monday noon-he reaches again the spot whence he
started, and still
the sun shines
overhead. When he alights from his machine, would he be correct in
declaring that it was
still Sunday noon?
DAYS CHANGE IN TRAVELLING
When a person
travels, his days are of abnormal length.
For example, the New
Yorker who travels westward across the United States finds it necessary
to set his
watch back one hour on
three different occasions in order that the time by his watch shall
correspond with
the true course of the
day. Otherwise his watch will register 3 P.M. when the California sun is
only at high
noon.
'Pursuing such a course
westward at a thousand miles a day will bring the traveler back to his
starting place
in twenty-four
days-estimating the world's circumference at exactly 24,000 miles, for
the sake of the
illustration.
But each of his
twenty-four days has been twenty-five hours long. Therefore in his trip
around the world
he had accumulated a
total of twenty-four extra hours. If he has not already dropped them an
hour at a time,
he must finally drop
the whole twenty-four at once, if he wishes to keep his reckoning
correct. Now
twenty-four hours equal
one day. Therefore he drops a day. But is a moment really stricken from
his life on
that account?
To say that the
Sabbath cannot be kept at the same identical moment of time in different
time belts, is to
assume a difficulty
which does not exist. As Mr. Bloom says:
Neither the Sabbath
command nor the Bible anywhere speaks of time belts, or of keeping the
Sabbath at
the same identical
moment of time. The Good Book tells us that we should keep the seventh
day, and that
we should keep it 'from
evening to evening.'
Mr. Speaker, God
does not ask man to base his obedience upon what other men in other
parts of the world
may be doing.
All of this is good,
sound common sense, and moreover is in harmony with the Scripture. The
human
family, in God's
providence, began to make its circuit of the earth from Western Asia and
the eastern
Mediterranean. One
portion of mankind went eastward through Asia into the fringe of islands
on that side
of the Pacific,
carrying the reckoning of time. Another portion of the human family
journeyed westward,
across Europe and into
the New World of the Americas and the island fringe beyond, carrying the
reckoning of time.
There is exact agreement the world over. In God's providence the
westward and the
eastward marches of
civilization meet in the mid-Pacific, and there, as we have already
seen, His own
providence, in the
history of the human race, fixes the day line.
A just solution to this
day-line round-world problem, therefore, shows that no real difficulty
exists
in the matter of
keeping the Sabbath, and that as a matter of fact any day can be found
on any part of the
earth, and -observed by
those who are disposed to observe it.
True, those who keep
the Sabbath cannot begin its observance simultaneously in all ports of
the
world, for, as has
already been shown, the day does not begin on all parts of the world at
the same time.
One cannot begin to
keep the seventh day until that day comes to that part of the world
where he is. It is not
one-seventh part of
time, a specific, uniform twenty four hour period to be kept by all at
the same identical
time, that God has
hallowed and sanctified, but the seventh day. It matters not to the
Sabbath observer in
China whether or not
his brethren in America start and close the Sabbath just when he does,
but he is
particular about
keeping the same day that they keep when it comes around to him. The
Sabbath is none the
less sacred to him
because of the fact that it is not observed at the same identical
instant of time by others in
other lands.
No one in New York or
Chicago would refuse a Monday morning's paper because in Berlin or
London the people have
had their Monday's paper hours before. We each take up Monday's duties
when
Monday comes, wherever
we are. All the Lord asks of man is that he shall keep the seventh day
holy when
that day comes to him.
And it will come. The sun is the divinely appointed timekeeper for man
(Genesis
1:15-18), and it never
fails. When the holy day comes, keep it.
The Sabbath comes to
the East before it comes to the West; but as it passes around the world,
it is
the same blessed, holy
day everywhere. The day line in the Pacific Ocean, which is offered as
evidence that
the Creator made a
world and a Sabbath which do not fit together, is in itself an absolute
answer to the
argument that the
fourth commandment means only that one day in seven should be kept. It
is said that
Sunday is a seventh
part of time; and so Sunday, the first day, will do as well as Saturday,
the seventh day.
But the fact that every
traveler must change his own reckoning of time by one day in crossing
the Pacific in
order to keep the true
sun time, which marks the days for all nations, forever dispenses with
this seventh
part of time theory.
The transpacific traveler could not follow the seventh part of
time theory and still
keep his Sunday. For in
travelling one direction he would have a week of only six days, and the
other way
his week would have
eight days. Thus if he stuck to Sunday, he would find himself observing
either onesixth
part of time or
one-eighth part of time during the week in which the line is crossed,
depending upon
the direction traveled.
But no such dilemma ever confronts the Sabbath keeper. He observes a
day, not a
certain part of time.
Wherever he finds the seventh day or wherever the seventh day
finds him, he keeps
it.
IN THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN
But can the Sabbath be
found and kept in the Land of the Midnight Sun, where it is six months
day and six
months night? We will
permit Mr. Canright to reply to this objection. The following paragraphs
were
printed by him before
he rejected the true Sabbath and while his vision was still clear:
It is claimed that
at the north pole there are several weeks when the sun does not set at
all; and again there
are weeks when it is
dark all the time. How can the seventh day be distinguished and kept
there? . . .
'Frequently those who
raise this objection are strict observers of Sunday, the first day of
the week. If there
is any force in this
objection, it comes with equal weight against Sunday keeping. How can
they keep the
first day there? If
they can find the first day, cannot we find the seventh? If they can
keep Sunday, cannot
we keep the Sabbath?
But there is no trouble in. either case. The days of the week are
plainly marked there
as well as here. Read
the travels of Dr. Kane, Hall, and others who have been there. Did they
experience
any difficulty in
keeping the reckoning of the days? None whatever. The days are marked
off by the
revolutions of the
earth, which are there, as well as here, indicated by the position of
the sun. The most of
the year, the sun rises
and sets there the same as here; that is, as far north as men have ever
penetrated. [Or,
in other words, as far
north as there are human inhabitants.] So far, there is no difficulty,
of course. In
midsummer, for a short
time, the sun is above the horizon all the time. Being so far north, a
person can see
the sun in its entire
circuit around the earth, day and night. But it is easy to tell when it
is overhead at noon,
when it is going down
in the west, when it is directly underneath at midnight, or when it is
rising in the east
in the morning. Can we
not tell the time of day here by the position of the sun in the heavens
without seeing
it rise and set?
Certainly. Then if we could see it all the way around, could we not tell
just as well as when
we see it only part of
the way around? Of course; and so those testify who have been in the
arctic regions.
But how is it in the
winter when it is night for weeks together? I believe there is no time
that rays of light
cannot be seen in the
south at noon of each day. This would be sufficient to mark each day.
But the
revolution of the earth
can be as plainly and as easily told by the position of the stars at
night as it can by
the sun at day. Any one
accustomed to observing the stars knows this. They appear to rise and
set and to go
around the earth the
same as the sun. Indeed, astronomers always reckon the day by the stars.
Read the
following letter which
I received from an eminent astronomer touching this point:
'OGDEN, UTAH, Sept.
24, 1873.
ELDER D. M. CANRIGHT:
By observations of the stars, the time can be found out at any time, day
or
night. Knowing the time
at which any star ought to be in the meridian, we find the difference
between noon
and the observing time,
or the local time. Stars being visible in the daytime and at night, on
all places of the
earth, it is possible
to determine the time without seeing the sun.
(Signed,) 'DR. F.
KAMPF,
Astronomer of the U.
8. Corps of Engineers.'
So, then, the exact
time of day can be told by the stars, and they can be seen in the
absence of the sun.
Hence this objection is
without foundation. . . .
Those who keep
Sunday live in all parts of the earth, and have traveled all around it
both ways. Do they
find any difficulty in
keeping the first day? Not in the least. This objection is all
imaginary; for, practically,
no one ever had any
such trouble. Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh-day Baptists are
scattered nearly
around the globe; and
yet they find no difficulty in keeping the seventh day Sabbath....
The Lord commands
His servants all around the world to keep the seventh day. Each one is
to keep it
when it comes where he
is, not when it comes where some one else is. When it comes to those in
Asia, they
can keep it. Several
hours later, it comes to England, and then they keep it, and so on
around the world.
This is sufficient
to show that there is no such difficulty as this objection supposes.
- The Morality of the
Sabbath, pp. 80-87.
And now to trace you
round this rolling world,
An eastern and a
western route you've twirled,
And made out nothing by
the spacious travel,
But what I call a
wretched, foolish cavil.
And now to make you
clearly understand
That Sabbath day may be
in every land,
At least those parts
where mortal men reside
(And nowhere else can
precepts be applied),
There was a place where
first the orb of light
Appeared to rise, and
westward took its flight;
That moment, in that
place the day began,
And as he in his
circuit westward ran,
Or rather, as the earth
did eastward spin,
To parts more westward
daylight did begin.
And thus at different
times, from place to place,
The day began-this
clearly was the case.
And I should think a
man must be a dunce
To think that day began
all round at once,
So that in foreign
lands it does appear, There was a first day there as well as here. And
if there was a first,
the earth around, As
sure as fate the seventh can be found. And thus you see it matters not a
whit, On which
meridian of earth we
sit, Since each distinctly had its dawn of light, And ever since,
successive day and
night; Thus while our
antipodes in darkness sleep, We here the true, primeval Sabbath keep.
WILLIAM STILLMAX,
quoted in Review and Herald, Feb. 3, 1852.
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