Besides coming in contact with various Reformed sects, which, to say the least, have a very vague con- ception of the third Commandment, our people were in many places also influenced by missionaries sent out by the Adventists. These missionaries found very fertile soil for their propaganda among the Norwegian immigrants, whose conception of the Sabbath was quite confused because of conditions prevailing in the state church from which they came. When our pastors began tn instruct their members as to what the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions teach concerning the Sunday question, they were vigorously assailed, not only by the Adventists, but also by Eielsen's adherents and the Augustana Synod. This controversy was later taken up by the Norwegian-Danish Conference, and was continued until the eighties.
During this whole controversy the fathers of the Norwegian Synod stressed the doctrine of the Scriptures and the Confessions in opposition to the traditions which in course of time had commonly been accepted even in parts of the Lutheran Church. They maintained that the third Commandment does not require of us the observance of any certain day as was the case in the Old Covenant. To the Christian every day throughout his life is a sabbath unto the Lord. To keep the Sabbath holy, one must use the word of God rightly and diligently. The word of God nowhere stipulates that Sunday is to take the place of the seventh day, which was the sabbath fixed by law in the Old Covenant. Exercising its Christian liberty, the church of the hew Covenant, for the sake of order and for other practical reasons, chose Sunday as the day on which to gather for public worship and for special use of the word of God, and not because of any direct command of God.
This controversy brought home to our people a very valuable lesson, inasmuch as the authority of Scripture and the Confessions was strongly stressed in opposition to all sorts of traditions and products of human reasoning.