the day." To quote a psalm or song for the Sabbath day: "It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises to thy name, O Most High. For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands. O Lord, how great are thy works! and thy thoughts are very deep." The feelings of good men in anticipating and reflecting on the public services of the sanctuary are thus indicated: “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord." "A day in thy courts is better than a thousand." "When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude; I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy day." The Sabbath, "the holy of the Lord," was to be called "honourable" and "a delight," and as the command was that persons were on that day not to do their own ways or find their own pleasure, the ways they were to do were God's ways, and the pleasure they were to find was pleasure in Him and in His service. No pretence of personal or family duties can exempt from the obligations of public worship. But neither must public interfere with domestic, nor either with personal duties. If there is one class of engagements that are more than another an evidence to a person himself of his own piety, it is the class of personal duties, secret prayer, meditation, self-examination, and the study of the Scriptures, and of other holy books. And yet it is not the observance of certain practices that shows the character so much as the spirit in which they are performed. How is it with us in this respect? Are we seen by Him, who seeth in secret, retiring from society on the Lord's day, that we may converse with our spirits and with their great and gracious Father and Redeemer ? Alas! if it be not so, it is too certain that we are not "spiritually minded which is life and peace, but carnally minded which is death." Our attendance in the house of God in this case is a mere self-righteous task, instead of a work of gratitude and love; a cloak to hide us from ourselves, instead of a gratification and a profitable discipline of the heart.

It is in accordance with the nature and designs of the Sabbath to devote a portion of it to works of benevolence and mercy. And our Lord, who hath left us an example that we should walk

in his steps, calls us by his own practice to these labours of love. On a Sabbath He cured a demoniac, and healed Simon's wife's mother of a fever. We find him afterwards restoring to strength

on that day the man who had for thirty-eight years been impotent, and commanding him to take up his bed and walk. He next vindicates his disciples against the cavils of persons who had censured them for plucking some ears of corn, and rubbing them in their hands, for the purpose of satisfying their hunger. He further heals a man whose hand was withered, and gives sight to another who had been born blind, having previously prepared clay and applied it to the man's eyes. He looses from her infirmity a woman who had been for eighteen years bowed together by Satan, and cures a man of the dropsy. The apostle Paul, who says, Be ye followers of me, even as I am of Christ, and who remembered that God will have mercy and not sacrifice, abruptly ended his discourse at Troas, that he might employ means for restoring to life the young man, Eutychus, who, overpowered with sleep, had "fallen down from the third loft, and was taken up dead." "Pure religion and undefiled before God the Father" consists greatly in this, "to visit the fatherless and the widow in their affliction." "As we have opportunity," we are to "do good," temporal and spiritual, "unto all, especially to them who are of the household of faith." And what day is more seasonable for "doing well" than the day which was appointed to be a blessing to man, provided we, like the Saviour, attend to its claims on us personally, and do not unnecessarily postpone to the Sabbath day what may and ought to be done before.

The law of the Sabbath requires more than the work which is limited to the day itself. It takes in all our time. It says, "Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work." Not that we are bound to spend the whole six days in secular work. Commands of moderation, of regard to health, and of daily acts of devotion and beneficence, come in to claim their share of attention, and to regulate a labour which becomes criminal and injurious by excess. The importance of redeeming time in general, and of diligence in all our business, is frequently recognised in Scripture. "Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well 1 Afirmativa ligant semper, sed non ad semper, negativa ligant semper et ad semper.

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to thy herds." "Seest thou a man diligent in business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men." "Even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat." And besides many other important reasons for such conduct, it is necessary to the sanctification of the Sabbath. The more diligent and regular we are in the business of the preceding week, the more prepared are we for that day: prepared in having all despatched in such time as not to encroach on sacred hours, and prepared in a free mind, a clear conscience, and in that full, satisfactory exertion of body and spirit in the matters of this life, which stimulates a desire for a holy rest. "He that is not faithful in his calling, will never care to keep the Sabbath; and he that keepeth the Sabbath, will be diligent in his calling. Those two are like the two cherubim whose faces looked one towards another."1

Nor is this the only preparation necessary for gaining the object of the Sabbath. This day fits us for the work of the others; but the others do not so much fit us for the work of this. An abridgment of the labour of the six days, while necessary to the full enjoyment of the seventh even as a day of rest, is no less essential to the complete attainment of its end as a day of holy service and happiness. To be immersed in worldly cares and pleasures, up to the last hour of Saturday, is incompatible with a right observance of the first day of the week. In like manner, if

the design of the Sabbath is to be fully answered, we must not immediately when it is over plunge into those occupations and pleasures which destroy the impressions, and prevent the benefit of the engagements of the day.

Another important duty connected with the Sabbath, and not confined to the day, is our promotion of its observance by others. "Thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates." It is the duty of doing good in this particular respect to our neighbour and brother; it is the duty of "not suffering sin," the sin of breaking the fourth commandment, "upon our neighbour.”

1 Weemes's Works, vol. ii. p. 223.

In concluding this exposition of Sabbatic duties, we must advert briefly to two additional topics.

First, It is only through faith in Jesus Christ that we can be safe, obedient, or happy under this law.

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By the law, including this as well as other precepts, is the knowledge of sin. The apostle says, without excepting the fourth commandment, "We know that the law is spiritual," reaching to the thoughts, desires, and aims of the mind equally as to the words and acts of the life. Tried by this one statute, who is not convicted by it of sin in heart and in conduct? But the wages of sin is death. "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in the book of the law to do them." "Christ Jesus," however, "came into the world to save sinners.” is salvation in no other." "By him all that believe are justified." And not until we are united to Him by faith, pardoned and renewed in the spirit of our minds, can we have any pleasure in His law and day; not until we have his grace given to us shall we be disposed to keep any one of the Divine commandments. "How deeply sensible," says the Rev. Henry Venn, referring to the Sabbath, "should we be of our own inability to observe the day according to the will of God." Faith works by love, and, believing, we rejoice with unspeakable joy; love to the person and law of Him who died for us and rose again; joy on account of His atonement, resurrection, and glory, and in the assurance thereby inspired of a blessed immortality. This spirit was attainable and attained in ancient times. Right-hearted men calling the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable, received the promise, "Then shalt thou delight thyself in God;" and seeing, like Abraham, the day of Christ, the day of His advent and reign, afar off, were glad; or beholding, like others, the stone which the builders rejected become the head of the corner, raised these notes of praise, "This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it."

Second, The Sabbath law is as sacred amidst the liberties of Christianity as it was under a severer economy, and enforced by yet more impressive sanctions. That its circumstances should be different was to be expected. They were not the same after the fall as they had been in Paradise, and they changed again when

the seed of Abraham, from being only families and wanderers, had become a settled and numerous people. The Sabbath could no longer be a type when the things shadowed by it had come. It could no longer be sanctioned by a penalty of death, because Christianity was not a theocracy. It could not offer rewards in the land of Palestine, for it is now part of a system, of which the field is the world. As time had made progress, and the natural had been succeeded by the moral creation-the deliverance from Egypt followed by the redemption from sin-it could now enter into relation to an event greater than even those of all preceding ages, and in adaptation to this event, might be transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week,-to the day when the Redeemer rose from the dead, and entered on his glorious rest. None of these changes could affect the nature of the Sabbath as a day of rest- -a day of holiness and service to the Lord. As the sun is the same orb that shone on the world yet unvisited by sin and unblasted by the curse, and now enlightens it as a revolted and blighted province of the universe-the same when rising brightly in the east, then enveloped in clouds, and then breaking forth in all its glory-so it is the same Sabbath which has cheered mankind in their conditions of original purity and subsequent depravation, and which, after varied fortunes, is now risen to its highest earthly honour. The Sabbath, like the sun, has never essentially changed. In ancient times, as really as now, it was a delight, and combined mercy with sanctity. Now, as well as then, it is not a day of idleness, or worldly business, or worldly pleasure. Has the removal of its penalty of death made its profanation less criminal than idolatry and disobedience to parents, which also no longer incur the forfeiture of the offender's life? Is redemption less holy and spiritual a subject of remembrance than creation? Because we are brought nearer to heaven, are we permitted to become more worldly-more occupied with amusement and vanities-less obliged to meditate, pray, and praise on the day which now more than ever borders on and resembles the days of eternity? This would be to say that God's moral law is mutable; that Christ came to relax it, to destroy foundations, to make man less just as to God's time, less holy in his service, and therefore less happy. What saith the New Testament ?

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