Many Mormons,
Presby-terians, Congregstionalists, Pentecostals, even some Bap-tists — in
short, the descen-dants of the Puritans and their friends of 16th-century
Britain — call Sunday the "Christian Sabbath." The Puritans ob-jected to
many pagan features of so-called Christianity. They prohibited May Day and
Christmas observances, etc., by law. They read the Bible, believed in real
obedience to God, and taught strict adhe-rence to godliness as a way of
life. They were strict about their "Sabbath." The May-flower
Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock In 1620 were Puritans, as were others
who landed later in different spots on the forbidding New England coast.
They were a stern, God-fearing race who fled the Old World for the New
World to practice the religion of their conscience in peace. Their
"Sabbath" was ob-served with rigor. But was it the Sabbath of
God?
It was 1646, April 3. The first
New England Thanksgiving was that year to be a quarter century old. By
this time, in old England, there were Sabbath-keepers—observers of
the seventh-day memorial of creation and creation's God (Ex. 31:13).
Another Massachusetts spring was not far away as John Cotton wrote out his argument to Thomas Shepard to prove that the first day of the week, and not the seventh, should be ob-served as the Christian Sabbath (Felt, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, p. 569).
Obviously, there was some diver-sity of opinion in Massachusetts about the Sabbath. And Felt goes
on
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Reprinted from The Good
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