The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.4

Why Save the Lord’s Day? 203 moral standards are low. They read scarcely anything and take practically no interest in current events. A boy asked his father to take him “next Sunday to see the animals at the Bronx Zoo.” The father has to work seven days a week, and he replied, “You needn’t go to the Bronx to see animals; look at me, I am not much different from the horses I drive in front of my milk wagon.” Do you wonder Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man? For man, that he might be something different from an animal. As soon as God had created man He ordained the Sabbath, because He knew the needs of man. We can ill afford to make light of God’s merciful pro­ vision of this weekly arrest of physical and mental toil. Sci­ ence supports the Divine law by showing in the analysis of the blood, that during our application to work through the week we recover in one night’s rest only five-sixths of the ounce of oxygen consumed out of our system by the day’s labor. Each morning finds one-sixth of an ounce lacking, so that a man is run down at the end of the week to the extent of that whole ounce of vitality. The Lord’s Day is a physiological necessity for the restoration of that one ounce. When a man presumes to be wiser than this law of nature and of God, he usually pays the penalty by breaking down with that peculiar malady “Americanitis,” a compound of insomnia and nervous debility. Then the physician most likely prescribes a sea voyage, for that will be an enforced rest for the depleted system. But a proper observance of the Lord’s day would have supplied that very need, because the Lord’s Day is a sea voyage between the two continents of monotony and drudgery. There would be little need of pro­ longed trips abroad, or sojourns in a sanatarium, if the Sab­ bath could have its claims respected. Fifty-two Sabbaths a year mean nearly two months vacation to every worker. When a man wipes the Sabbath out of his calendar he breaks a law of nature, and nature always squares accounts with broken

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