tionably, is not by any means of the strict, and what has been called the "Sabbatarian," school. Dr. Hessey, in his Bampton Lectures, (1860,) thus speaks :"The Lord's day, at the death of St. John, presented the features of periodical assembling for prayer, thanksgiving, partaking in the Christian mysteries, and religious instruction. Charity to the brethren, and thoughts upon Divine things, were other employments of it. Nothing was said of rest; but rest, so far as those times admitted, from worldly employments, was no doubt a feature of it, from the nature of Him whom they worshipped, from the necessities of the case, from the physical demands of the body, from the analogy of the Jewish law, from the example of the Creator: considerations which the Apostles must have had before them, when, under Divine directions, they observed a Lord's day. Such a Lord's day as this, was, I think, contemplated by the Apostles, and observed by them and by the early church."

Fourthly. It has been objected, that even granting the Divine authority, sacred eharacter, and perpetual obligation of the Sabbath, its due observance is not incon sistent with innocent recreation and rational amusement.

"To the law and to the testimony:" what saith "the Book?" "Turn away thy foot from the Sabbath," (let there be no unnecessary travelling,)" from doing thy pleasure on My holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and honour Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words." (Isai. Iviii. 13.) Such is the statute on this subject.

Innocent amusements, rational recreations, are pleaded for as being consistent with the character of the Sabbath! What do the parties who thus plead, mean? Is it insinuated that sinful amusements, that irrational pleasures, may be indulged in on any day of the week? Innocent amusements! Where is the line to be drawn? Are not games of cricket, the regatta, the steeple-chase, the fox-hunt, the horse-race, in the estimation of these parties, innocent amusements? Do not the theatre, the concert, and the ballroom afford, according to the views of VOL. VII.-Second Series.

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these persons, rational recreation and elevating and refining pleasures? Will they pronounce any of these to be unlawful amusements? And are these to be the Sabbath exercises of the people? If not, why not? These are the worldlings' innocent amusements; but where is the Christian man who does not see and feel that they are utterly inconsistent with the spirit and design of the Sabbath?

"But we plead," it is said, "for the liberty of the people, and against a puritanical Sabbath." The liberty of the people! We are bold to assert, that the stanchest defenders of the civil, social, and religious liberty of the people from the days of the Stuarts to this hour-are the very men who have contended most earnestly for the sacredness of the Sabbath. History has a lesson to teach on this subject, and we commend that lesson to the serious consideration of the people of these realms.

A "puritanical Sabbath!" A day of penance and mortification! What a spectre to call up! We plead not for it; we condemn it. But where is it to be seen? We venture to affirm that in not one of ten thousand of the godly Sabbathkeeping families of our land is this spectre to be found. It exists only in the excited brain and diseased vision of those who wish to substitute the frivolities and dissipations of a Continental gala-day for the decent and decorous, yet cheerful, observance of the Sabbath of God. These parties draw a caricature, and not a portrait; they sketch a phantom of their own imagination, and then endeavour to frighten themselves and others, by raising the cry of a "puritanical Sabbath!"

Many and heavy accusations on this subject have been brought against the Sabbath-keeping part of the community. The keeping of God's holy day, according to the commandment, has been sarcastically styled, a "bitter observance of the Lord's day. A "bitter" observance ! We thank them for that word. Contrast the real enjoyment, the holy calm, the domestic peace, the moral dignity of the family devoutly and reverently observing the Sabbath, with the confusion, the bustle, the mutual recriminations, the disappointments, the fatigue at the end of

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the Sabbath, of the Sabbath-breaking family, and then say, in which has been the "bitter" observance? Mark the one as the shades of Sunday night approach. The public duties of the day are over; the whole circle join in cheerful hymn or holy song; "the priest-like father reads the sacred page," and they retire to rest, a happy and united band, refreshed in body, soothed in mind! Look at the other, on Sunday night :-They have had a day of pleasure, and are homeward bound. A weary mother drags along a yawning child; the father, chafed and vexed, carries another sleeping one in his arms; irritable through fatigue, there are mutual expressions of anger. They reach their dwelling: no cheerful fire gleams from the hearth; all looks cold and chill: the children are cross, the body tired, and, without any recognition of God, of heaven, of immortality, they lie down to slumber! Which is the "bitter" observance?

Let Monday morning speak.-But we say no more.-The outline now sketched can be filled up, from their own experience, by thousands, and by tens of thousands. The Sabbath has been styled, very beautifully and appropriately, and by England's working men,- "The Light of the Week;" "The Torch of Time;" "Heaven's Antidote to the Curse of Labour." It is God's great boon to man. Working men, guard your Sabbath! A Sunday of pleasure will inevitably lead to a Sunday of labour. If you travel, thousands must toil. Let the thin edge of Sunday amusement be inserted, and mammon, and competition, and pleaded necessity, will soon drive in the full wedge of Sunday work. Seven days' labour for six days' wages will soon be the problem which the working man will have to consider. Oppose every encroachment upon the sanctity of the Sabbath at the beginning. You are safe, and only safe, whilst the Sabbath is regarded as the "LORD'S DAY." It is not your employer's, it belongs not to the Legislature; they have no right to entrench upon its sacredness :-IT IS THE LORD's; given to you for your rest and refreshment; given to you for your physical, mental, and moral improvement; given to aid you in securing eternal life!

In conclusion, we would sum up in the

beautiful and eloquent language of the revered and sainted RICHARD WINTER HAMILTON:-"0, Sabbath! Needed for a world of innocence,-without thee what would be a world of sin! There would be no pause for consideration, no check to passion, no remission of toil, no balm of care! He who had withheld thee would have forsaken the earth! Without thee, he had never given to us the Bible, the Gospel, the Spirit! We salute thee, as thou comest to us in the name of the Lord,-radiant in the sunshine of that dawn which broke over creation's achieved work,-marching downward in the track of time, a pillar of refreshing cloud and of guiding flame, interweaving with all thy light new beams of discovery and promise,-until thou standest forth more fair than when reflected in the dews, and imbibed by the flowers of Eden,—more awful than when the trumpet rung of thee on Sinai! The Christian Sabbath! Like its Lord, it but rises again in Christianity, and henceforth records the rising day. And never since the tomb of Jesus was burst open by Him who revived and rose, has this day awakened, but as the light of seven days, and with healing on its wings! Never has it unfolded without some witness and welcome, some song and salutation! It has been the coronation-day of martyrs, the feast-day of saints! It has been from the first until now the sublime custom of the churches of God! Still the outgoings of its morning and its evening rejoice! It is a day of heaven upon earth! Life's sweetest calm, poverty's best birthright, labour's only rest! Nothing has such a hoar of antiquity on it! Nothing contains in it such a history! Nothing draws along with it such a glory! Nurse of virtue, seal of truth! The household's richest patrimony, the nation's noblest safeguard! The pledge of peace, the fountain of intelligence, the strength of law! The oracle of instruction, the ark of mercy! The patent of our manhood's spiritual greatness! The harbinger of our soul's sanctified perfection! The glory of religion, the watch-tower of immortality! The ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reacheth to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending on it!"

Leeds,

THE VALUE OF A SOUL.
AN ASTRONOMICAL ILLUSTRATION.

THERE are values, says a writer in "The Family Treasury," which arithmetic cannot compute, as there are depths in the ocean which no plummet has yet sounded. A soul is one of these values. The human line runs out in the measurement of its duration : arithmetic fails in the summation of its worth. We can weigh mountains in scales, and hills in a balance. We have determined the mass and gravity, as well as the path, of each planet in the starry host. But the value of a soul is a problem that waits solution. In our Lord's computation, the largest of earthly values, the world itself, is put into one scale, and a soul in the other; and as the computation is being made, the question is put, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" There is confessedly not even an approximation to its value in the comparison of our Lord. And, if world should be cast after world into the scale with our earth, till the sun with its planetary system, till the universe of matter were in one scale, and a soul in the other, we should have approached no nearer the solution of the question, What is the worth of a soul? Alas! that in contrast with its inherent preciousness should be the practical every day value put upon it. It is a monarch incognito ; a glory veiled. What so cheap in the market of the world! What coin so small as will not buy a soul! What mess of pottage that will not tempt some Esau to throw away his heritage! Even the man whose life is an offering on the service of the faith, and who burns with zeal for souls, with difficulty sustains his estimate of their preciousness. It is the deep wail from many a Missionary journal : "How insensible have I become to the degradation of the Heathen! How difficult I feel it to realize, amidst their own insensibility, the preciousness and peril of their souls!" To this state of mind, whether experienced by the Minister at home, or the Missionary abroad, the following letter of the Rev. T. G. Ragland may bring fresh quickening. It is the illustration of a high Cambridge Wrangler, after he became Missionary in India, of

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the value of a soul, drawn from his previous astronomical studies, and affords a beautiful evidence of the deep yearning love of the heart of the true Missionary over the most abject in that land, the wretched outcast pariah. Writing home to a friend, he says:

:

"An idea some time since formed itself in my mind, and I have at this moment a violent fancy to form it more definitely on paper. Dear Deck used to tell a tale of a simple Suffolk ploughboy. Walking home one moonlight night, he fell in with the youth. He was a servant of his brother's. 'And is not that moon,' said the lad, 'much larger than it seems?' " They say so,' said our friend; but what size do you think it to be? Why, indeed, I can't say for certain; but somehow I should think it was just about large enough nicely to lie down in our meadow!' So much for the ploughboy's fancied knowledge and real ignorance. To moralize upon it: Apply it to the manner in which men, and thinking men, and Christians, and real Christians, judge of the human soul. They value it, and think they value it highly they will do something, and think they do much, for the salvation of the souls of their fellow-sinners. But indeed, and in truth, I think the knowledge which a blessed eternity will bring us, will prove our fancied knowledge to be no more extended, if so much so, as the Suffolk ploughboy's about the moon. But cannot we correct our knowledge a little? Let us go and learn a lesson from the astronomer. How does he correct the knowledge, the first knowledge, which simple vision brings him in? How is he sure that the moon is larger than a green cheese, or that those little planetary specks have a greater magnitude than a pin's head? Why, first of all, having discovered, by a process which it is unnecessary to describe, that the little dot of light is, in fact, thousands of miles distant, and having discovered by telescope that it subtends at the eye a sensible angle, and having measured that angle, a simple calculation shows him the size of the object to be greater perhaps than that of the huge ball which he calls his earth; and in every case something, at

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least, beyond what would give a plain section ten, or twenty, or a thousand times the magnitude of that meadow in Suffolk, in which, as the ploughboy supposed, the moon would nicely lie down. Now, let us go through a similar operation with that wonderful thing the human soul. Take one of these,-say the soul of the poorest, lowest pariah of India, -and form it, in imagination, into, or suppose it represented by, a sphere; or, what will do equally well, a circular area. Place this at the extremity of a line, which, as Newton ingeniously uses it in a certain lemma, (I forget the number,) is to represent time. Extend this line, and move off your sphere further and further, ad infinitum; and what is become of your sphere? What has become of your poor pariah's soul? Why, there it is, just as before, with faculties as perfect as ever; as living, as sentient, as capable of knowing and enjoying its great Creator as ever. It is still what it was, and that even after thousands of years. In short, the disc appears undiminished though viewed from an almost infinite distance. O, what an angle of the mind ought that poor soul to subtend! What an interest ought its salvation to excite, and to keep alive! But the astronomer has another method of determining, if not the magnitude, yet at least the importance of the heavenly spheres. A man may come to him and say, 'I grant that your moon and your planet are as large as you assert, but why brag so much about them? They are, perhaps, only unsubstantial froth; mere puffs of air; vapory nothings, like comets.' 'No, my friend,' the astronomer will reply; 'not so fast. I know their mass and their weight, as well as their

size. The ignoramus may stare; but the philosopher stands to his word, and with good reason. Long observation has taught him that planets, in the neighbourhood of one given heavenly body, have been turned out of their course: how, and by what, he is at first quite at a loss to tell; but he has guessed and reasoned, and has found cause for suspecting the planet. He watches, observes, and compares; and, after a long sifting of evidence, he brings it in guilty of the disturbance. If it be so, it must have a power to disturb, a power to attract; and if so, it is not a mere shell, much less a mere vapour. It has mass, and it has weight; and he calculates and he determines from the disturbances what that weight is. Just so with the pariah's soul. O, what a disturbance has it created! What a celestial body has it drawn down from its celestial sphere! not a star, not the whole visible heavens, not the heaven of heavens itself, but Him who fills heaven and earth, by whom all things were created! Him did that pariah's soul attract from heaven even to earth to save it! O that we would thus learn, and, learning, lay to heart, the weight and the value of that one soul!"

It was thus whilst he journeyed amidst the Shamars, the devil-worshippers, and pariahs of south India, the Cambridge Fellow recalled his science to sustain his zeal, made his knowledge tributary to faith, and all things to minister to his work. What wonder that he who so thought and wrote should have been drawn out of his college orbit to make known to the benighted Heathen Him whom that Heathen's soul attracted from heaven even to earth to save it!

No. CVI.

"For I was envious at the foolish, when 1 saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no bands in their death: but their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men; neither are they

plagued like other men." (Psal. lxxiii. 3-5.)

There is a thing in the mind comparable to the palsy or apoplexy in the body; and it is the state that the most part of the world passeth away in: a

certain numbness, or blockishness, that neither reason can persuade them, nor all the threatenings terrify them, nor all the promises allure them, nor anything move them. Then they pass to death without any sense of God's judgments; so they perish and die as beasts, nothing differing from them, but only for the furniture of beds and pillows. This in them is in great measure; those that have their hearts as fat as brawn, that can see nothing; and in small measure it is in all. Thus God makes our hearts and state the punishment of our pride.Andrewes's Moral Law Expounded, p. 198. Edit. 1642.

No. CVII.

"All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made." (John i. 3.)

John begins his Gospel with the dignity of Christ's Person. And how does he set it forth? By the creation of the world by the eternal Word: and what he saith is an answer to these questions: When was the Word? "In the beginning." Where was the Word? "With God." What was the Word? He " was God." What did He then do? "All things were made by Him." What, all, without exception? Yes; "without Him was not anything made that was made:" be it never so small, never so great; from the highest angel to the smallest worm. They all had their being from Him.- Manton on Christ's Eternal Existence and Dignity, p. 55. Edit. 1685.

No. CVIII.

"Thomas answered and said unto Him, My Lord and my God." (John xx. 28.) In the history there are these remarkable things:

1. Thomas's absence from an assembly of the disciples, when Christ had manifested Himself to them. Being absent, he not only missed the good news which Mary brought, but also the comfortable

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sight of Christ; and was thereby left in doubts and snares.

If

2. When these things were told him, he bewrays his incredulity; for "he said unto them, Except I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe." This unbelief was overruled by God's providence, for the honour of Christ. His incredulity was an occasion to manifest the certainty of Christ's resurrection. credulous men, or those hasty of belief, only, had seen Christ, their report had been liable to suspicion. Solomon maketh it one of his proverbs, "The simple believeth every word." Here is one that had sturdy and pertinacious doubts, yet is brought at last to yield. However, this is an instance of the proneness of our hearts to unbelief; especially if we have not the objects of faith under the view of the senses; and how apt we are to give laws to heaven, and require our terms of God.

3. Christ's condescension in giving Thomas the satisfaction of sense. "Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My side." With what mildness doth our Lord treat him, though under such a distemper! Unbelief is so hateful to Christ, that He is very careful to have it removed; and in condescension grants what it was his fault to ask.

4. Thomas's faith. "He answered and said, My Lord and my God." He presumed not to touch Christ, but contents himself only to see Him; and having seen Him, makes a good confession. Observe the two titles given to Christ. He is "God," the Fountain of all our happiness; and "Lord," as He hath a dominion over us, to guide and dispose of us at His own pleasure. Observe, also, the appropriation, or personal application to himself: "My God," and my Lord."-Ibid., pp. 195-197.

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HOME AFFECTIONS. FAMILY habits and Protestantism, says a contemporary, seem to go together. In

Spain, a diminutive cup of chocolate, brought into the bedroom, is the apology for a breakfast: in Russia, the meal, as