Chapter 3 - part 6
"You do
know something about it, don’t you?" exclaimed the churchman, with
more respect in his tone for the serious young man before him. "But
see here; you go your way, and I’ll go mine. We are all on the same way
to heaven anyway, and I judge we will all get there. You keep your
Sabbath, and Brother Brown and I will keep ours. God does not expect the
impossible of us. On a round world everybody can’t keep the same day at
the same time anyway.
Sam Brown glanced
at his man Frank with a look that said, "I’m pretty sure you will
have something ready for him on this, too." And Frank had.
"We may be all
on the same way to heaven," he said, "but the unfortunate fact
is that some of us are going one direction on it and some the opposite
direction, and it makes all the difference in the world which way one is
headed as to whether he reaches heaven or not. Jesus says He is ‘the
way,’ and He kept the seventh-day Sabbath; and He said also that He came
not to destroy the law about the Sabbath but to fulfill it — fill it
full by obeying it. It is His Sabbath, not mine, except to keep.
Your Sabbath is man’s sabbath; and Christ said, ‘In vain do they
worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.’ Matthew
15:9.
"If everybody
can’t keep the same day on a round world then everybody on a round world
can’t keep Sunday on the same day; so why do you insist that everybody
shall, and why would you have strict civil laws to try to compel them to
do what you say is absolutely impossible to do? The truth is, as you know,
that no one anywhere in the world has any trouble telling which day is
Sunday or Saturday, or any other day. The Sabbath command says nothing
about a requirement to keep the same day at the same time. It says to keep
the seventh day, of course the seventh day when it comes to us wherever we
are. It comes in due time to Jerusalem, to Shanghai, and to Honolulu. The
sun marks the day, and it carries the day around the world with it, and
each people keeps the day as it comes to them. As you say, God does not
expect the impossible, but He does expect each one to do what the
commandment and common sense tell him to do."
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