Ellen G. White and Her Critics

The Sabbath Doctrine Takes Definite Form

Let us turn, now, to look at the early development of the doctrine of the seventh-day Sabbath. One of the first Millerites to accept the Sabbath was T. M. Preble of New Hampshire. He published his view in February, 1845, in an Adventist paper called The Hope of Israel. ^* Bates read this article, was persuaded of the Sabbath, and in August, 1846, brought out a forty-eight-page pamphlet entitled The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign. In his pamphlet he states that the reading of the Preble article “convinced” him of the Sabbath in the spring of 1845, but adds: EGWC 185.3

“Contrary views did, after a little, shake my position some, but I feel now [August, 1846] that there is no argument nor sophistry that can becloud my mind again this side of the gates of the Holy City.”—Page 40. EGWC 185.4

In January, 1847, Bates published a second, enlarged, edition of his Sabbath tract. EGWC 185.5

In the first edition Bates builds his argument for the Sabbath almost exclusively on the premise that the Sabbath was instituted at creation and re-enacted in Exodus 20; that the Ten Commandments are the moral rule for Christians and the seventh-day Sabbath is therein commanded. He touches briefly on a prophetic aspect when he observes, in his historical sketch of the change of the Sabbath, that the prophet Daniel describes the little horn as thinking to change times and laws, that this little horn is the Papacy, and that the times and laws are God’s law, very particularly the law of the Sabbath. Bates then asks his Adventist readers: “Now the second advent believers have professed all confidence in his [Daniel’s] visions; why then doubt this.”—Page 42. EGWC 186.1

In the second edition of his Sabbath tract Bates builds the prophetic argument for the Sabbath not simply on a brief reference to Daniel’s vision on the little horn but also on the declaration of the apostle John in Revelation 14:9-11. In so doing he provided the contrast between God’s Sabbath and the mark of the beast, which has been a distinguishing feature of Seventh-day Adventist preaching from that day to this. EGWC 186.2