Clifton Tracts

In accordance with the instruction given in the catechisms from which the foregoing quotations were, made, a work entitled The Clifton Tracts (Catholic), Vol. IV, chap. 4, under the title, “A Question for all Bible Christians,” makes a precise statement of the positions held respectively by Catholics and Protestants on this question, in the following forcible language:ChSa 155.6

“I am going to propose a very plain and serious question, to which I would entreat all who profess to follow ‘the Bible, and the Bible only,’ to give their most earnest attention. It is this: Why do you not keep holy the Sabbath day?ChSa 155.7

“The command of Almighty God stands clearly written in the Bible in these words: ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.ChSa 155.8

Six days shall thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shall not do any work.’ Exodus 20:8, 9. Such being God’s command, then, I ask again, Why do you not obey it? Why do you not keep holy the Sabbath day?ChSa 156.1

“You will answer me, perhaps, that you do keep holy the Sabbath day; for that you abstain from all worldly business, and diligently go to church, and say your prayers, and read your Bible at home, every Sunday of your lives.ChSa 156.2

“But Sunday is not the Sabbath day; Sunday is the first day of the week; the Sabbath day was the seventh day of the week. Almighty God did not give a commandment that men should keep holy one day in seven. But he named his own day, and said distinctly, Thou shall keep holy the seventh day; and he assigned a reason for choosing this day rather than any other, a reason which belongs only to the seventh day of the week, and cannot be applied to the rest. He says, ‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.’ChSa 156.3

“Almighty God ordered that all men should rest from their labor on the seventh day, because he too had rested on that day; he did not rest on Sunday, but on Saturday. On Sunday, which is the first day of the week, he began the work of creation, he did not finish it; it was on Saturday that he ‘ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.’ Genesis 2:2, 3. Nothing can be more plain and easy to be understood than all this, and there is nobody who attempts to deny it; it is acknowledged by everybody that the day which Almighty God appointed to be kept holy was Saturday, not Sunday. Why do you, then, keep holy the Sunday, and not the Saturday?ChSa 156.4

“You tell me that Saturday ‘Was the Jewish Sabbath, but that the Christian Sabbath has been changed to Sunday. Changed! but by whom? Who has authority to change an express command of Almighty God? When God has spoken, and said, Thou shall keep holy the seventh day, who shall dare to say, Nay, thou may work, and do all manner of worldly business on the seventh day; but thou shall keep holy the first day in its stead? This is the most important question, which I know not how you can answer.ChSa 156.5

“You are a Protestant, and you profess to go by the Bible, and the Bible only; and yet in so important a matter as the observance of one day in seven as a holy day, you go against the plain letter of the Bible, and put another day in the place of that day which the Bible has commanded. The command to keep holy the seventh day is one of the ten commandments; you believe that the other nine are still binding; who gave you authority to tamper with the fourth? If you are consistent with your own principles, if you really follow the Bible, and the Bible only, you ought to be able to produce some portion of the New Testament in which this fourth commandment is expressly altered, or, at least, from which you may confidently infer that it was the will of God that Christians should make that change in its observance which you have made....ChSa 156.6

“The present generation of Protestants keep Sunday holy instead of Saturday, because they received it as a part of the Christian religion from the last generation, and that generation received it from the generation before, and so on backward from one generation to another, by a continual succession, until we come to the time of the (so called) Reformation, when it so happened that those who conducted the change of religion in this country, left this particular portion of Catholic faith and practice untouched.ChSa 157.1

“But, had it happened otherwise. Had some one or other of the reformers taken it into his head to denounce the observance of Sunday as a popish corruption and superstition, and to insist upon it that Saturday was the day which God had appointed to be kept holy, and that he had never authorized the observance of any other, all Protestants would have been obliged, in obedience to their professed principle of following the Bible, and the Bible only, either to acknowledge this teaching as true, and to return to the observance of the ancient Sabbath, or else to deny that there is any Sabbath at all. And so, in like manner, any one at the present day who should set about, honestly and without prejudice, to draw up for himself a form of religious belief and practice out of the written word of God, must needs come to the same conclusion. He must either believe that the Sabbath is still binding upon men’s consciences, because of the divine command. Thou shall keep holy the seventh day; or he must believe that no Sabbath at all is binding upon them, because of the apostolic injunction, Let no man judge you in respect of a festival day, or of the Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ’s. Either one or the other of these conclusions he might honestly come to. But he would know nothing whatever of a Christian Sabbath,’ distinct from the ancient, celebrated on a different day and observed in a different manner, simply because Holy Scripture itself nowhere speaks of such a thing.ChSa 157.2

“Now mind, in all this you would greatly misunderstand me if you supposed I was quarreling with you for acting in this manner on a true and right principle, in other words, a Catholic principle, viz., the acceptance, without hesitation, of that which has been handed down to you by an unbroken tradition. I would not tear from you a single one of those shreds and fragments of divine truth which you have retained. God forbid! They are the most precious things you possess, and by God’s blessing may serve as clues to bring you out of that labyrinth of error in which you find yourselves involved, far more by the fault of your forefathers, three centuries ago, than by your own. What I do quarrel with you for is, not your inconsistency in occasionally acting on a true principle, but your adoption, as a general rule, of a false one. You keep the Sunday, and not the Saturday. And you do so rightly; for this was the practice of all Christians when Protestantism began. But you have abandoned other Catholic observances, which were equally universal at that day, preferring the novelties introduced by the men who invented Protestantism to the unvarying tradition of above fifteen hundred years.ChSa 158.1

“We blame you, not for making Sunday your weekly holiday, instead of Saturday, but for rejecting tradition, which is the only safe and clear rule by which this observance can be justified. In outward act, we do the same as yourselves in this matter we too, no longer observe the ancient Sabbath, but Sunday, in its stead; but then there is this important difference between us, that we do not pretend, as you do, to derive our authority for so doing from a book; but we derive it from a living teacher, and that teacher is the church. Moreover, we believe that not everything God would have us to know and to do is written in the Bible, but that there is an unwritten word of God, which we are bound to believe and obey. Just as we believe and obey the Bible itself, according to that saying of the apostle, “Stand fast, and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle.” 2 Thessalonians 2:14 [Douay Bible].ChSa 158.2

“We Catholics, then, have precisely the same authority for keeping Sunday holy, instead of Saturday, as we have for every other article of our creed, namely, the authority of ‘the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth’ (1 Timothy 3:15). Whereas, you who are Protestants have really no authority for it whatever; for there is no authority for it in the Bible, and you will not allow that there can be authority for it anywhere else. Both you and we do, in fact, follow tradition in this matter; but we follow it, believing it to be a part of God’s word, and the church to be its divinely appointed guardian and interpreter; you follow it, denouncing it all the time as a fallible and treacherous guide, which often ‘makes the commandment of God of none effect.’”ChSa 158.3

In another Catholic work, called a Treatise of Thirty Controversies, we find the following cutting reproof:ChSa 159.1

“The word of God commands the seventh day to be the Sabbath of our 1,ord, and to be kept holy; you [Protestants], without any precept of Scripture, change it to the first day of the week, only authorized by our traditions. Divers English Puritans oppose against this point, that the observation of the first day is proved out of Scripture, where it is said, the first day of the week. Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2; Revelation 1:10. Have they not spun a fair thread in quoting these places? If we should produce no better for purgatory, prayers for the dead, invocation of the saints, and the like, they might have good cause indeed to laugh us to scorn; for where is it written these were Sabbath days in which those meetings were kept? Or where is it ordained that they should be always observed? Or, which is the sum of all, where is it decreed that the observance of the first day should abrogate or abolish the sanctifying of the seventh day, which God commanded everlastingly to be kept holy? Not one of those is expressed in the written word of God.”ChSa 159.2