Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1891-05-03

SUNDAY, MAY 8.
these things, come and join our party. You
are the man we want.
AiQuestion of Greed.
The other letter deals with quite differ
ent matter. The writer says:
There has come to our little village Seventh
Day Adventist minister, who has been Tor the
past three weeks holding forth In one OF our
churches. claiming that God by express COM
mand, required the seventh day TO De Kept as
the Sabbath, and, as Gods command cannot be
changed, that this is binding upon the church
through all time. He asserts that the Roman
Catholic Church changed the day from the
seventh to the first day of the week 300 years
after Christ BE also says that sne homan n,
Revelations and that the mark OF ihe Beast
is this observance of the first day OF the week.
He says that the present generation Will see the
second coming of Christ.
the Bible the truth of all these Claims. he
certainly has the whole book on the end or his
tongue. and It is amazing to near n1m quote
verse. He is thoroughly conversant with 1t.
But it seems to mo that he juggles with it
sometimes to make it prove his assertions.
1have always been content to believe that the
church was to interpret the Scripture for us,
but it seems the church has been wrong from
the very foundation. He accepts nothing but
the Bible; all history and tradition he brushes
away as cobwebs obscuring the true meaning
The Baptists of this place sent for q minister
to come and prove that there was divine au-
thority for the change. The debate is to con-
tinue four nights, and tonight is the second
night, and the Adventist tonight, during the
argument, brought your name into the contro-
versy by quoting from one of your sermons
contained in The PITTSBURG DISPATCH,
where you say 1--WE are all Sabbath breakers"
! thought l might ask you if our church,
which processes to be under the guidance OF
the Holy Spirit and has been from its begin
ming has taught this stupendoIs- error and has
always been deliberate Sabbath breaker. I
feel tonight that if it is true that it could be
allowed to teach an error under the guidance
of the Holy Ghost all these l.900 years, there is
nothing left for me but unbelief in the whole
thing. do hope you will consider this worthy
an answer. have written it while listening to
the debate. on sudden impulse.
This Isn't New Experience.
How perfectly straightforward and nat
ural that isl The Bible, quoting Adventist
with that old, old talk about the Beast"
silent now these many years, except in the
country villages, and the Baptist coming to
meet him in one of those plain-spoken,
hard-hitting, gladiatorial discussions which
used to be events in the history OF. .commun-
tiles, and which have done such good SER
vice in training our fathers in the arts of
and this perplexed listener, privately medi-
tating "unbeiief in the whole thing it the
church could be actually shown to be in
error-hOw plain! You can see them all, in
the homely, lamp-lighted meeting house.
But what to say?
Why, first, that even supposing the
church to have been in error in this matter,
that is no reason for "unbelief in the whole
thing" This is one of the oldest OF mis-
takes in reasoning. The Latin name for it
is tdlsus in uno. talsus in on1nibus-mis-
taken in one particular, mistaken in "the
whole thing" There is no logic in that.
You might as well argue that man"who
will eat with his knife win break the sixth,
seventh and eighth commandments. He
has shown himself in error in manners, he
must therefore be in error in morals. Some
people do actually argue that if the. writer
in his scientific notions of the material
world, then the writer of the epistle to the
Romans, living some fifteen or twenty GEN.
turies later, must have been mistaken in his
teachings ABOUT the spiritual world.
Applied to the Case in Point.
And here is my good correspondents stand
ing ON the brink of the conclusion that if
the church is in error as to the keeping of
holy day, then the church is no longer to be
trusted in any particular. My dear friend,
the chu.ch mas all along been making mis-
takes, and is making mistakes to-day, and
will keep on making mistakes to the end of
time. To be sure, there is the guidance of
the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit has
human beings to guide. And not even the
Holy Spirit can keep great company of
human beings in a perfectly straight pain
except by putting them into straitjackets.
We have wills which God chooses to leave
free, and to guide and not compel. So long
as we have free wills we are exposed to the
of falling into error. Error is
inevitable. But error in one thing does not
mean error in everything.
But is the church in error? Here is
custom !. 900 years old, or 900 anyway, al
lowing the preacher his 800 years for the
present For all these centuries the church,
under all names and conditions in all
lands and languages, has kept the first day
holy instead of the seventh. And this in
the face of the plain letter of the command
ment. Evidently there must be some rea-
son for this condition of things. The day
was changed; that is clear; and everybody,
Bible in hand, agreed to it. But now the
Seventh Day Adventists say that all this is
a grave error. Perhaps tine Seventh Day
are in error: that is at least pos-
sible.
The Real Value of Tradition.
The village preacher, as reported by my
has cast away all history and
tradition in his reading Of the Bible. That
was q perfectly natural and excusable mis-
take in the days whea it was first made, in
the days of the Reformation. 1t was reac-
tion from an undue emphasis upon tradi-
ton. Tradition observed the truth. But
are but temporary conditions. BY
and by we get back to the even judgment.
And we know now what the real value of
tradition is. It is not authority, but testi-
mony. It is, together with history, our only
way of getting back close to the days of the
Bible, and learning how it was understood
BY the people to whom it was written. We
inquire as to the meaning of a text or a Gus.
tom. And we are helped toward an answer
by finding out what they thought about it
who lived in that time. Shall we take
Christ's command about feet-washing as lit
eral like the institution of the Lords Sup
per, or not? The two are on just the same
level in the gospel. History and tradition
alone can tell us. Cast away history and
tradition? You might as we'll take the
Hebrew Bible by itself and cast away the
grammar and the lexicon.
So we get back to the Bible. Here is the
fourth commandment. It is in two parts:
Remember that thou keep holy the Sab
bath day" is the first part; the remainder is
the second. Compare Exodus xx. with
Deuteronomy vi, and you will see the Sec
ond part is different in the two places, The
frst part is the command of God, the second
part is the command of Noses ANY
scholar will tell you that the original form
Of the commandments is considered TO have
been ten brief sentences, like the sixth,
seventh and eighth, The rest was added for