of
which is twenty-four hours. Jesus says there are but twelve hours in the
day, (from sunrise to sunset.) Then twelve hours night to make a
twenty-four hour day, you see, must always begin at a certain period of
time. No matter then whether the sun sets with us at eight in summer or
4 o'clk in winter. Now by this, and this is the scripture rule, days and
weeks can, and most probably are, kept at the North and South polar
regions. What an absurdity to believe that God does exonerate our
fathers and brothers from [43]keeping his Sabbath while they are in
these polar regions, fishing for seals and whales, should it be with
them either all day or all night. If they have lost their reckoning of
days and weeks, because there was, or was not any sun six months of the
time, how could they learn what day of the week it was when they see the
sun setting at 6 o'clock on the equator, if bound home from the South?
By referring to Luke, xxiii ch. 55, 56, and xxiv: 1, we see that the
people in Palestine had kept the days and weeks right from the creation;
since which time, astronomers teach us that not even fifteen minutes
have been lost. God does not require us to be any more exact in keeping
time, than what we may or have learned from the above rules, but I am
told there is a difference in time of twenty-four hours to the mariner
that circumnavigates the globe. That, being true, is known to them, but
it alters no time on the earth or sea.

But, says one, I should like to keep the Sabbath in _time_, just as
Jesus did. Then you must live in Palestine, where their day begins seven
hours earlier than ours; and yet it is at 6 o'clock in the evening the
same period, though not the same by the sun, in which we begin our day.
Let me illustrate: our earth, something in the form of an orange, is
whirling over every twenty-four hours. It measures three hundred and
sixty degrees, or about twenty-one thousand six hundred miles round, in
the manner you would pass a string round an orange. Now divide this
three hundred and sixty degrees by the twenty-four hour day, and the
result is fifteen degrees, or nine hundred miles. Then every fifteen
degrees we travel or sail eastward, the sun rises and sets one hour
earlier in the period of the twenty-four hours: therefore those who live
in Palestine, one hundred and seven degrees east of us, begins and
closes the day seven hours earlier, so in proportion all the way round
the globe, the sun always stati