Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

They had an iron sense of duty,
SABBATARIANISM 179
an iron righteousness.
Their Hebraism is the root of New England
honesty; it is our hope in the present perils of the
republic. The attitude of Puritanism toward the
Bible was an immense gain over that of Catholicism.
Puritan Sabbatarianism, like that of the grim passage
in Numbers, is a step toward an earnest use of
sacred time as included within the eternal.
The warnings that it brings are, first, the general
warning that "ignorance in action" is always terrible;
and secondly, the warning that civil authority
can never make a Sabbath. It would seem as if
this last lesson ought, by this time,
to be effectively
stamped by history upon the minds of Christians.
But it is not. There are still multitudes of good
men invoking the aid of legislation not merely to
protect but to secure Sunday worship. Such men
can only look upon advocates of spiritual
sabbath-
Ism as friends of atheism, physicians whose
method Is kill or cure. But the kingdom of Christ
remains what It has always been, a kingdom not of
this world.