APPENDIX VIII

THE COVENANTAL SABBATH

 CALENDAR REFORM

"The reform [of the calendar — N.L.] would break the division of the week which has been followed for thousands of years, and therefore has been hallowed by immemorial use." — M. Anders Donner, formerly professor of astronomy at the University of Helsingfors, p. 51.

"One essential point is that of the continuity of the week. The majority of the members of the Office of Longitudes considered that the reform of the calendar should not be based on the breaking of this continuity. They considered that it would be highly undesirable to interrupt a continuity which has existed for so many centuries." — M. Emile Picard, permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences (France), president of the Office of Longitudes, p. 51.

"I have always hesitated to suggest breaking the continuity of the week, which is without a doubt the most ancient scientific institution bequeathed to us by antiquity." — M. Edouard Baillaud, director of Paris Observatory, p. 52.

"It is very inadvisable to interrupt by means of blank days the absolute continuity of the weeks — the only guaranty in the past, present, and future of an efficient control of chronological facts." — Frederico Oom, director of the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon, Portugal, p. 74.

Nature, the leading scientific journal of Great Britain, in an editorial department entitled "Our Astronomical Column", carried an item "Calendar Reform", in which the proposed blank-day calendar was discussed. In part it reads as follows: "The interruption of the regular sequence of weeks . . . excites the antagonism of a number of people. Some of these (the Jews, and also many Christians) accept the week as a divine institution, with which it is unlawful to tamper; others, without the scruples, still feel that it is useful to maintain a time unit that, unlike all others, has proceeded in absolutely invariable manner since what may be called the dawn of history. This view found support at the meeting of the International Astronomical Union at Rome in 1922".— June 6th, 1931."