and celebrate the Lord’s day.  We endeavor to arrest the attention of our fellow professors to the great design of it and of the coming together of the members of Christ’s family on that day.  When assembled for this chief purpose, the reading of the Scriptures, teaching, exhortation, prayer, praise, contributions for the poor, and discipline when called for, are all in order and necessary to the growth of the Christian Church in all the graces of the Spirit, and in all the fruits of holiness.—­ALEX.  CAMPBELL, in Millennial Harbinger, Vol.  I., p. 534, New Series.

And what an audacious wrong and unutterable blunder would it be for God’s chosen people to adopt an order that should defraud themselves, their children, their neighbors and their neighbor’s children of such a glorious privilege.

If we could imagine two communities, one of which should, with their children and their children’s children, diligently devote the Lord’s day to purposes of moral, religious and intellectual improvement, while the other community should waste the day in idle and frivolous dissipation, what unmeasured progress would ultimately be made by one beyond that made by the other.  And to which of these two classes will that favored people belong to whom will be awarded the high privilege of introducing among jarring sects and parties the true millennial church?

And do not these considerations go far to explain the contrast that is everywhere seen to exist between Protestant and Catholic countries?  Among Protestants the day is a day to be sanctified to purposes of religious worship, among Catholics it is a holiday.

The peculiarity of our position creates an invincible necessity that we shall make the largest possible provision for the moral, intellectual and religious training and development of our people.  This provision is largely found in keeping the ordinances of the Lord’s house and the Lord’s day.  We have made a vow, and that vow is recorded in heaven, that we will meet together every first day of the week to break bread.  To do otherwise—­to show a good-natured imbecility of purpose—­to drift helplessly along in the usages of the Old Baptists, conscious in our own hearts that this is not the ancient order of things, and having sternly demanded conformity to the apostolic order, at whatever sacrifice of peace, now to suffer our own brethren to travel on in the old ruts, rather than hazard the pain and trouble that will be the price of reform, would be a folly so inexcusable, a shame so unutterable, that the very stones might well cry out against us.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Professor William H. Whitsitt, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, at Louisville, Ky., has written a book that has for its leading feature to make it appear that the Disciples are an “offshoot from the Sandemanians.”