Here is an interesting piece of history. During the time of the pioneers, Adventists were sometimes involved in public debates, usually regarding the Sabbath doctrine. This is, to my knowledge, the only printed record of one of those debates. Merritt Cornell is defending the Sabbath against Miles Grant, who is an Advent Christian, but doesn’t believe in the seventh-day Sabbath.
Although parts of the discussion were made up of notes, and therefore are not exact, and there are sometimes arguments missing that are referred to by the other side, it gives us some insight into the reasoning used by the early Adventists when they defended the Sabbath.
It is especially interesting to see how they handled anti-Sabbath arguments drawn from the book of Galatians, since that is the book which got E. J. Waggoner into trouble, many years later, when he showed clearly that the moral law, as a “schoolmaster,” was especially pointed out as having “passed away” after it led the repentant believer to Christ to receive righteousness. On this issue, Cornell falls short, as his fellow pioneers often did, of seeing the full extent of the law indicated in Galatians, and the danger of legalism.
I’ve also included a foreword which contains statements from Ellen White regarding the danger of a spirit of pugilism that could arise in debating, and some discussion of the law as related to the Sabbath, and the book of Galatians. 137p
