of the Sabbath are incited by its teachings and studies, and which, while indisposing for and precluding indolence and unworthy occupations, make them intelligent and acute on all subjects that concern their true interests. The desire of knowledge, awakened in reference to the momentous matters of religion, will "seek to intermeddle with all wisdom."

From the account of the educational provisions of the Sabbath which has thus been presented, it might be conclusively inferred that an institution so adapted to the constitution and improvement of the human mind must yield correspondent fruit; in other words, that individuals must be distinguished by intelligence, and communities by civilisation, in proportion as they have observed a weekly day of sacred rest. It ought to require no tedious process of reasoning, or long array of facts, to convince any one that a person who rests every seventh day from severe intellectual efforts, and refreshes his spirit for new exertions, will be more enlightened and more capable of adding to the stock of human knowledge than another who goes on in an unrelieved, unvarying, and therefore depressing and enfeebling course of application to the same studies. Argument and evidence ought still less to be demanded in support of the very obvious truth, that the man who spends fifty-two days of the year in dealing with the most intellectual and varied of all subjects, will be superior in mental capacity and acquirements to him who spends the same amount of time in unremitting bodily toil, or in mere recreation and amusement. In proportion as this is true of the individuals composing a society, it must be true of the aggregate body. The inveterate dislike to the institution, however, which has set many to the utmost stretch of their ingenuity for the purpose of perplexing and complicating a very plain matter, requires us to show that intellectual improvement, besides being among the adaptations, is everywhere the actual result of a hallowed Sabbath.

What Sabbath-observing nation, it has been asked, has ever been barbarous or ignorant? The lands of the Sabbath and of the Bible have always been the chosen abodes of knowledge, and the lights of the earth. The Jews were in possession of a literature when darkness covered all other people. Every nation that received the gospel and the Christian Sabbath found them to be

the elements of learning and civilisation. Corrupted though Christianity soon became, it remained even in the dark ages in some measure an asylum of literature, and a conservator of learned works. Whence that corruption? Rome perverted the Sabbath, discouraged the general reading of the sacred volume, and wellnigh quenched the light of the pulpit in spectacles, pageants, buffoonery, and the mysteries of the mass, and its life in pæans to Mary and curses against heretics, proving herself then, as she is still, an incubus on the progress of Europe to light and prosperity. But the Reformation, which liberated the sacred day from human impositions, raised it from the degrading level of unauthorized festivals, restored the Scriptures to unrestricted use, and elevated the pulpit to its place as the great instrument of unfolding and enforcing sacred truth and law, was everywhere the reviver of letters, and the nurse of a spirit of inquiry and intelligence. Let England and France, Scotland and Spain, Canada Upper and Canada Lower, the United States and Mexico, Ulster and Connaught, show how much intellectual character is affected by the presence or absence of a holy Sabbath. No country has continued so long to maintain its superiority in respect of the attainments of its learned men, and the general intelligence of its people, as Britain; and in no country has more regard been evinced to the Lord's day. Next in order to Britain comes America, advancing with rapid strides in "the march of intellect as well as of religion, and already, perhaps, in the department of common education, outstripping its rival. Nor in their own mental supremacy merely, but in taking the lead of all others as propagators of knowledge and civilisation throughout the world, do these great nations exhibit the power of the principles which it is the business of the Sabbath to expound and conserve, to enforce and diffuse. Never was more done in defence of the institution, or more of its spirit felt, than from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the Restoration, a period which a high authority pronounces to be unequalled in point of "real force and originality of genius" by any other age, those of Pericles, of Augustus, of Leo X., and of Louis XIV., being unworthy of comparison with it.1

1 Francis Jeffrey. See Edinburgh Review, vol. xviii. pp. 275, 276; and Jeffrey's Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, vol. ii. pp. 38, 39.

No less distinguished, as regards the body of the people, were the times in the history of Scotland when not only the claims and observance of the Lord's day were contended for, but efforts were successfully made to set up an adequate number of schools in every parish, as well as to raise a high standard of theological literature; and the times of those Puritans who settled in America, and who, the friends of a day of holy rest, were also educated and intelligent men, few if any of them being unable to read, and one of the first subjects of their attention being a suitable provision for the establishment of common schools and academies. In our own day, it is Sabbath-observing parents who are most anxious to have their children educated; it is Sabbathkeeping artisans who are the most diligent readers of their class, as well as the most numerous pupils in our schools of art. The fact of one thousand and forty-five working men having written essays on the institution-all of them creditable to the writers— six hundred of them so respectable, as, in the opinion of a gentleman who had carefully examined them, to be worthy of appearing in print, and a few such as would have done no discredit to the most practised pens, is indeed a phenomenon in the literary world, which nothing but the mighty power of the Sabbath and of its connected influences can explain. Many working men, however, have no weekly resting-day. Now, as one of the above-mentioned writers asks, "When did we ever meet with any one who from the nature of his employment is required to labour on the Sabbath as on other days, who has come out of his obscurity, and taken his stand as an author in literature, science, morals, or religion? Indeed," as he adds, "no one expects it; the bare supposition is ludicrous."1 And yet those men are not inferior in natural capacities to other men. Their frequent efforts to obtain emancipation from their protracted hours of labour, that they might enjoy the rest of the seventh day, have evinced a desire of better things, as well as a deep conviction, that, while the cause of their degradation is the loss of that sacred season, its recovery is the main instrument for elevating their mental condition.

If the Sabbath had done nothing more than promote the intelligence and civilisation of the masses, it would be entitled to our

1 The Universal Treasure, p. 125.

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high regards. But this is not its only intellectual triumph. blesses in the same way all classes of minds that come under its influence. In the department of secular knowledge, it is a means of good to both foes and friends; to foes, who are trained in youth under its auspices, and afterwards feel the salutary impulse of its encompassing spirit; to friends, among whom may ever be discovered the most distinguished men in all kinds of mental endowments and exertion, with a few, such as Lord Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Jonathan Edwards, who by general consent occupy a pre-eminent place among the intellectually great. And there is another department of knowledge, the spiritual, belonging exclusively to true Christians, who, in proportion as they have maintained the integrity and honour of their religious institutions, have, by "rising from nature" to its Author, by searching after "the cause of causes," and in the range of their vision taking in the infinite and eternal, proved themselves to belong to a higher order of intelligences, and to possess far greater grasp and power of mind than those philosophers, scholars, and sages, who are learned in the writings of men, but not in the Word of God; who have measured the distance of the stars, and told us what is contained in the bowels of the earth, but have not soared to the heaven above, nor sounded the hell below; who have calculated the period of an eclipse, but not the hour of death; who have explored the constitution of the soul, but considered not its accountableness or destination; who have wasted themselves in investigating the changes which this earth has undergone, without a single reflection on their concern in that great crisis, when "the earth with its works shall be burnt up."

CHAPTER III.

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE SABBATH.

"A corruption of morals usually follows a profanation of the Sabbath."-BLACKSTONE. "Il n'y a pas de religion sans culte, et il n'y a pas de culte sans dimanche."

MONTALEMBert.

JOHN FOSTER describes the Sabbath as "a remarkable appointment for raising the general tenour of moral existence.” 1 The saying, and that of Blackstone, as may afterwards appear, are abundantly verified by facts. Meanwhile, a brief inquiry into the rationale of the matter will discover grounds for accrediting the institution with the results uniformly seen to follow its observance-in other words, for identifying it as an essential instrument in their production.

First, then, if we view the weekly holy day as a periodical pause of labour, we shall find that it is conducive to the interests of morality. Its regular rest recruits the animal frame, and prevents some strong temptations to intemperance. Men must have either rest, or artificial means of enabling them to sustain an unnatural amount of effort. The Sabbath provides the former, intoxicating drink supplies the latter. The weekly season of freedom from toil and trouble secures also a regular opportunity for the cultivation of domestic intercourse, that powerful incentive to virtue. In the nature of things can virtue thrive, or vice fail to abound, among married persons who are deprived of the soothing, refining influences of home, and must not the unmarried be led by the same circumstances to forego the hope of honourable matrimony, and to resort to an unhallowed substitute ? Incessant labour, moreover, renders moral improvement impracticable, as it allows no sufficient or regular time for attention to the matter.

1 Evils of Popular Ignorance (1839), pp. 47, 48.

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