BV 110 .H36 1888 Hamilton, Thomas, 1842- Our rest-day OUR REST-DAY ITS ORIGIN, HISTORY, AND CLAIMS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO PRESENT-DAY NEEDS. BY THOMAS HAMILTON, D.D, BELFAST. BEma THE ESSAY TO WHICH WAS AWARDED A PRIZE OF ONE HUNDRED POUNDS OFFERED BY THE SABBATH ALLIANCE OF SCOTLAND. New Edition, Revised and Enlarged, "Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum." Q. Horatius Flacciis, EDINBURGH : JAMES GEMMELL, 19 George IY. Bridge. 1888. TO The Rev. W. D. KILLEN, D.D., PRESIDENT AND PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND PASTORAL THEOLOGY, ASSEMBLY'S COLLEGE, BELFAST, TO THE YEAHS SPENT AT WHOSE FEET THE WRITER OP THE POLLOWINa PAGES LOOKS BACK AS AMONG THE HAPPIEST OF HIS LIFE, AND TO WHOSE SAGACIOUS COUNSEL, PROFOUND LEARNING, AND FAITHFUL FRIENDSHIP HE HAS OFTEN SINCE BEEN INDEBTED, THIS TREATISE IS RESPECTFULLY ^zyunUti* PREFACE. fHE history of this treatise may be told in a few words. In 1883, the Sabbath Alliance of Scotland offered four prizes of £100, £50, £30, and £20 respectively, for the best four essays on the Sabbath, which should be sent to them before July 31st, 1884.* The difficult task of adjudicating on the merits of these was entrusted to the Rev. Professor Mitchell, D.D., St. Andrews, the Rev. John Marshall Lang, D.D., Barony Parish, Glasgow; the Rev, Principal Rainy, D.D., New College, Edinburgh ; the Rev. Andrew Thomson, D.D., Edinburgh ; and the Rev. J. Chalmers Burns, D,D., Corstorphine. Over two hundred and forty essays were lodged with the Secretary of the Sabbath Alliance before the specified date, and out of these the adjudicators, in the July of this year, unanimously selected that which * The Alliance were enabled to oflfer these prizes through the liberality of a large hearted friend of the Sabbath, J. T. Morton, Esq., London. vi Preface, appears in the following pages as the best. To the writer thereof was accordingly awarded the prize of £100, and it is now published in accord- ance with the terms of the original proposal, and with the earnest hope that its circulation and perusal may do some service to the cause of the Sabbath of the Lord. It is right to mention that the line of discus- sion to be pursued in the essays was fixed by the Committee of the Sabbath Alliance. Pos- sibly, had the present writer been left to his own free choice, the consideration of some topics of which he has treated might have been omitted, and that of others added. The literature of the Sabbath question is immense, and not much of it was left unexa- mined in the course of the writer s study. To mention all the volumes which were consulted would be to compile a very tedious catalogue. The larger works on the subject, such as Dr. Hessey's Bampton Lectures, and Dr. GilfiUan's treatise on ^'The Christian Sabbath viewed in the light of Reason, Revelation and History," must of course be made use of by every student of the question. Professor McGregor's little book, "The Sabbath Question: Historical, Preface, vii Scriptural and Practical," (Edinburgh, Duncan Grant, 1866), is not so well known, at least on this side of the Channel, although it contains much excellent matter. There are also two pamphlets, small in size, but replete with sound thought and r '^curate reasoning, which the writer has special pleasure in mentioning, inasmuch as their authors are two of the orna- ments of the Church to which he has the honour to belong. These are : " The Permanent Obli- gation of the Decalogue," a sermon by the Rev. Robert Watts, D.D., Professor of Divinity in Assembly's College, Belfast, and " The Sabbath not a Church Holiday, but a Divine Ordinance under all dispensations," by the Rev. Thomas Witherow, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Magee College, Londonderry. Both of these have been consulted with great advan- tage in the preparation of this essay. The help derived from other sources will be found ac- knowledged in the body of the work. With these prefatory observations, the trea- tise is now left to the kindly consideration and unbiassed judgment of the reader. Let its arguments and conclusions be tried by the un- erring standard of the Word of God, to which viii Preface, appeal is made throughout, and the writer can- not doubt that their correctness will be admitted. May the Lord of the Sabbath use the book for the service of the Day which He Himself has made ! Brookvale House, Belfast, October, 1885. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, In this New Edition the original Essay has been carefully revised throughout, some matter of mere transitory interest has been omitted, three new chapters, entitled respectively " The Change of Day," " Some Nineteenth Century Sabbath -keepers," and " How the Conflict goes on," have been added, and the text has been elucidated and strengthened by a body of notes. In this enlarged and improved form, it is hoped that the book will render increased ser- vice to the good cause for the advancement of which it was at first written. Brookvale House, Belfast, August^ 1888. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY, PAGE The "Sunday- Stone" — Status qucestionis defined — A world- wide observance of a Day of Rest to be accounted for — Postulates, ...... 1 CHAPTER II. **H0W OLD ART THOU?" The Story of Creation — Its principle six days of work and one of rest — The Day-Period theory — Hugh Miller's view — The Proleptical interpretation of the Genesis account of the Sabbath — Paley's argument — The Sab- bath appointed at Creation — Intended for man, be- cause (1.) God needed no rest for Himself; (2.) the Sabbath was the first day man ever saw ; (3.) it was given to the first father of the human race ; (4.) our Lord declares, " The Sabbath was made for man ; " (5.) God "blessed" the Day and "sanctified" it; (6.) The Fourth Commandment bases man's Sabbath rest on the Divine rest after Creation ; (7.) we have a septenary division of time from Creation onwards, which is only to be accounted for by the fact of the institution of a Sabbath — Christ the Creator alike of the earth and of the Sabbath, Contents, CHAPTER III. TRACES OF THE SABBATH IN ANCIENT LANDS AND LITERATURES. PAGE Such Traces to be expected— Greek Literature — Homer Hesiod — Linus— Callimachus— Letter of the Rev. T. S. Hughes regarding quotations from these authors — His views examined — Latin Literature — Assyrian Re- cords—The Fifth Tablet from the Library of King Assur-bani-pal — An Assyrian Religious Calendar — Sabbattu— Traces of the Sabbath in Chinese History — Its supposed silence on the subject— Chinese fune- ral customs — An old Astronomical Table — "The Book of Diagrams "—" The Imperial Almanac of China" — Egyptian Records— A remarkable table — The Sanscrit days of the week, . • .19 CHAPTER IV. A CURIOUS THEORY. Dr. Samuel Lee's Sermon on the Sabbath before the Uni- versity of Cambridge — Do we keep the Sabbath now on the same day on which Adam kept it ? — Did the Seventh Day Sabbath date from the Exodus ? — Rev. James Johnston's Sermon — Interesting nature of the speculations of these authors — Their laudable object — Difficulty of seeing how a Sabbath kept on the first day of the week can be said to be kept on the same day as the original Sabbath of the world— No evidence forthcoming sufficient to prove the theory — The evidence adduced from Chinese and other Ori- ental annals and calendars not conclusive — The theory substitutes two difficulties for one — Dr. Lee's speculation as to there being strong grounds for believing that the first Jewish Sabbath was kept at Succoth — The hypothesis not at all necessary to strengthen our proof for Sabbath observance — None of our great Hebrew or Greek scholars, and none of our distinguished theologians have adopted this theory— The danger of such arguments, . . 30 Contents, xi CHAPTER V. THE SABBATH NOT A MERE JEWISH INSTITUTION. The scene at Sinai when God gave the Law of the Ten Words — For whom was that Decalogue intended ; for Jews only or for all mankind ? — The view of Protes- tant Christianity as expressed in its leading symbols — The Westminster Confession of Faith — The Book of Common Prayer — The Church of Pome — Our appeal, however, not to churches or creeds — Nature's De- mands — Experience of the Peign of Terror — Dr. Farre's Testimony — What saith the Scripture ? — The error of confounding Law with Covenant — The cir- cumstances of the giving of the Law at Sinai spoke of permanence — The contents of the Decalogue bear no temporary aspect — Illustrations from several of "" a the Commandments — The Fourth particularly exam- ) ined — Its remarkable position in the Decalogue — Its--^ main features, and the duties which it inculcates as permanent as those of the other nine — The Decalogue expressly recognised in the IS'ew Testament — Teach- ing of our Lord — The Young Man who came to Christ " — The Sermon on the Mount — The teaching of the — Apostles — Objections met — That we are "not under law but under grace " — That it is inconsistent with the freedom and spirituality of the New Economy that we should be trammelled by the Decalogue — The objection from the wording of the Preface to the Ten Commandments — Has Christ by His atonement re- leased us from the dominion of the law ? — Impossi- bility of the repeal of the Decalogue — What the New Economy has done for the Decalogue — The Fourth Commandment specially examined — Nothing in it leading us to suppose that it was intended to be con- fined to the Jews — Its language considered — Dr. Norman Macleod's views examined — Mr. Herbert Spencer's — Conclusion, . . .36 /, CHAPTER VL THE DECALOGUE AND THE SABBATH. How does the Law of the Sabbath stand among the Ten xii Contents, PAGB Commandments ? — It is in the Decalogue — We can- -^ oiot have the other nine without it — Its position in ^ the Decalogue notis'-eable — Its relations to the other Commandments — The character of the Fourth Com- mandment — Not less important than the other nine — — On the contrary God has a special regard for it — Evidence from Palestine — The Fourth Command- ment a Test — Its double aspect — A law not only for the Sabbath but for all our time — It provides the opportunity for learning the duties prescribed in the other nine — Traces of Divinity in it — Paley's Watch — The Heidelberg Catechism and the Command- ments, ...... 59 CHAPTER VII. CHRIST AND THE SABBATH. AH parties to this controversy agreed that the authority of the New Testament on the subject is supreme — The word Sabbath occurs sixty times in the Autho- rised Version of the New Testament — Three Greek words represented by this one term — The Revised Version — Our Lord's teaching on the subject — The ^7alk in the Corn-fields— The Withered Hand— The Scene in the Capernaum Synagogue — In the Nazareth Synagogue — VVatering the ox or the ass — At the Pharisee's House — Sabbath dinner parties — The miracle at Bethesda — Defence of Sabbath healing — Curing a blind man on the Sabbath — "Pray ye tliat your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sab- bath day " — " Sabbath " or " Sunday," which ? — The Sabbath and the death of our Lord — Summary of Christ's teaching regarding the Sabbath — He neither abolished it nor relaxed its sanctions — He observed it Himself — He foresaw and sanctioned its observance after He should be gone — He cleared it from the ac- cretions of Rabbinical tradition and gloss — He taught that it was to be a day of worship — a day of benefi- cence — a day of holy freedom — He gave it new mean- ing and beauty by making it His Resurrection Day, . 70 CHAPTER VIIL THE APOSTLES AND THE SABBATH. References to the Day in the Book of Acts— The Sabbath Contents. xiii PAQK Day's journey — Reasoning with the Jews in the synagogue on the Sabbath — Change to the first day of the week — References in the Epistles — Coloss. ii. 16, 17, explained — Rom. xiv., 5, 6— Galatians iv. 11 — Heb. iv. 9 — KaraTrauo-ts, Ai/aTravo-is, Sa^/Saxicr/xos — No period since Creation without a Sabbath, and none ever to be — Summary of the teaching of the Apostles, 89 CHAPTER IX- V THE CHANGE OF DAY. That there has been a change evident — The precise point of time when it began also undoubted — Before Christ's Resurrection only a Seventh-Day Sabbath— Since only a First-Day Sabbath — Testimony of th^ Evan- gelists as to the day on which our Lord "rose — From that date the first day has had transferred to it the Sabbath sanctity — Evidence of this from Scripture — From Pliny — Justin Martyr — Eusebius — By what authority has this change been made ? — The example and teaching of the Apostles — No doubt they had the authority of Christ for what they did — They cer- tainly had His Example — Paul also still sometimes met with Jews on the Seventh Day — Reason of this — Reasonableness of the change of day — Dr. Ward- law's Argument, . , , . . 95 CHAPTER X. THE CHURCH OP ROME AND THE SABBATH. How the Church of Rome treats the Decalogue — Her muti- lation of it illustrated from Dr. Butler's Catechism — One entire Commandment omitted — The alterations which she makes in others — The six which she adds to God's Ten — Her treatment of the Fourth Command- ment — Only a small part of it recognised — Her theory of Sabbath observance — Teaching of the Maynooth Catechism — Difi'erences between it and Butler's — Romish holy days and their effect on Sabbath observ- ance — Practical results of her teaching — The Irish National League and the Sabbath — Differences be- tween Romish and Protestant countries and districts, 107 xiv Contents, CHAPTER XL HINTS ON SABBATH OBSERVANCE. Principles brought to a practical issue — How the New Testament deals with Sabbath observance — It goes into no details — But gives us great principles — Its wisdom in this — The great principle that the Sabbath has been given to man as a day of holy rest, and should therefore be kept as such — Some Sabbath work unavoidable — Should be no narrow Pharisaic tone about the day or its observance — Not to be a day of gloom, or asceticism, or privation, or austerity — But a day of rest and spiritual enjoyment — Neces- sity of preparation for it — Saturday-night Shopping — Picture of a Sabbath long ago — General Grant's Testimony — Burns's " Cotter's Saturday Night," . 117 CHAPTERXII. SUNDAY TRADING. The "Sunday Closing" of Public-houses — Present posi- tion of the movement — Scotland's position — State of the case in Ireland — In Wales — In England — Results of the "Five Years' Experiment" in Ireland — Open shops on the Lord's Day — State of London in this respect — Of Glasgow — What has been done in Geneva, ...... 126 CHAPTER XIII. SUNDAY PLEASURING. The Opening of Public Museums, Picture Galleries, and Libraries on the Lord's Day — Arguments in favour examined — Plea in the name of the Working Man — The Sabbath God's Day, to be kept holy to Him as He has appointed — The Working Classes as a body make no demand for the opening of places of amuse- ment on the Sabbath — Their petitions against it — Mr Broadhurst's resolution — The proper solution of the difficulty — The certain evil results of Sunday opening — It would lay add tional burdens on Working Men Contents. xv PAQB — Its tendency to turn the Sabbath into a day of work — Dr Andrew Thomson's statement — John Stuart Mill's opinion — Mr Samuel Smiles's — The proposal deals with man as a mere animal, and leaves his soul altogether out of account — It is part of a general movement for the introduction of the Conti- nental Sunday — Mr Rossiter's paper in the Nine- teenth Century — Fallacies of his argument — Testi- monies of Lord Cairns and others — "The Sunday Society," 13] CHAPTER XIV. UNNECESSARY SABBATH TRAVELLING. Great development of Sabbath pleasure travelling in late years — Is it right ? — The cruelty inflicted by it — Letter from a Railway Porter — Evil effects of over- working Railway Employes — Mr Wm. H. Vander- bilt — Sabbath pleasure traffic a violation of God's law — The general disregard of Sabbath duty which it involves — Common Pleas for Sabbath excursions examined — The Morbus Sabhaticns — Feasibility of abolishing Sunday railway traffl.c — The London and North- Western Railway — The Louisville, New Albany, and Chicago Railway — President Young's opinion — General Divon's — Other modes of Sabbath travelling — Sunday tram-cars, , , , 143 CHAPTER XV. SABBATH POSTAL WORK. Amount of Sabbath work in the Post-Office — Example of London — If it can do without any delivery of letters on the Sabbath, why cannot other places ? — What can be done — Government Regulations on the sub- ject, ....... 158 CHAPTER XVI. SOME NINETEENTH CENTURY SABBATH KEEPERS. Queen Victoria and the Sabbath — Anecdotes — George III. — Testimony of Edward Corderoy, Esq. — Lord xvi Cotitents, PAGE Barham — General Dobbs's Plan — Incident in the life of Commodore Perry — A converted Chinese Mer- chant — Story told by Lord Shaftesbury — " This shop will not be opened on Sundays " — Lord Macaulay's opinion — The most perfect Sabbath-keeping city in the world, ...... 161 CHAPTER XVII. HOW THE CONFLICT GOES ON. In England — The petition to Convocation in 1888 — How some of the upper circles in London spend the Sun- day — What the Times said — The Select Committee of the House of Commons on Sunday Postal Labour — Scotland — Ireland — The Sunday Closing Act — Earlier Saturday closing — The Irish General Assembly — Prizes offered by J. T. Morton, Esq. — Aspirations for a Sabbath on the Continent — Italy — Austria — Germany — Petition of the Berlin Carpenters to Prince Bismarck — Belgium — Holland — Russia — Significant movements in Russia — Lesson for us, . 172 CHAPTER XVIII. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER. Besumi of the argument — Further testimonies — Coleridge — Christopher North — Chalmers — Joseph Cook — Proudhon — Favre — 641 London Physicians — The Earl of Beaconsfield — Mr Gladstone — What is the conclusion? .••... 182 OUR REST-DAY CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. f[N some of the coal-mining districts of England f there is found a curious deposit which the miners ^ call " Sunday Stone." On making a section of a piece of it, it is seen to consist of layers of stalagmitia matter, regularly superimposed on each other, with this peculiarity, that after six strata of a blackish hue there appears, with the utmost regularity, one stratum of pure white — then six more of the black, with a seventh of the white, and so on through the entire thickness of the deposit. The explanation of this remarkable formation is easy. Down in the coal-mine, water, filtrating through the limestone roof, becomes highly impregnated with carbonate of lime. Dropping on the floor in a continual trickle, this forms a deposit. While the miners are at work, the coal-dust which pervades the atmosphere, mingling with the dropping water, imparts a blackish hue to the deposit. But when the Day of Rest comes round, on which the mine is quiet, the water, having nothing to sully its purity, deposits a layer of beautifully white mineral ; and so, by examining such a section as we have spoken of, one can trace back the history of the mine through all the weeks up to the first Sabbath which has left its white mark upon the rock. A 2 Our Rest- Day, Now, let lis imagine for a moment that, ages hence, all our present institutions and order of things, civil and religious, had disappeared, swept away by suc- cessive national catastrophes. The New Zealander, with whom Lord Macaulay has made us all fami- liar, sits on the broken arch of London Bridge, and meditates on what London may have been in the ages long gone by. He roams through the country, as the traveller now wanders among the mounds of As- syria. He peers curiously into all the relics of the life of the great empire which is no more. Among the rest he comes on a block of this " Sunday stone " in some disused mine of the Black Country. He notes with wonderment its bands of snowy white recurring so regularly after the six of smutty black. In other parts of the deserted colliery he discovers other blocks of similar stalagmite in process of formation before his eyes ; and all these are pure white — no layer of black running through them. Being an intelligent New Zealander, as one of such an era, the heir of all the ages, is likely to be, he hits upon the secret of the formation of the "Sunday stone." He concludes, according to the fact, that this mysteriously -marked piece of rock in his hand has been formed by deposi- tion, like the mass of stalagmite now forming in snowy purity upon the mine floor. But he reasons further that, during six days in the lives of those people amoncr the ruins of whose civilisation he is treadinof, the water which percolated through the rock and dripped upon the floor was contaminated with dust — dust raised by toil among those black coal-seams por- tions of which still remain, raised by some of those picks which lie broken at his feet ; but that during the seventh day no grimy particles defiled the air or water ; no work therefore was done ; that the rule of these lands, in the days whose remains he is exam- ining, was six day's work and one day's rest. And he Introducto7y. 3 sets himself to solve the problem thus presented w him — How came it that these busy old Englishmen intermitted all labour for a seventh of time ? Our position, in entering upon the inquiry to be pursued in this essay, we desire to be a somewhat similar one. We find recurring, at its regular septen- ary intervals in the course of the world's affairs, this white-marked day. Six days the dust of the world's business darkens. One is free from it, more or less. Here is a phenomenon to be accounted for — surely a very remarkable phenomenon. We are so familar with it that it strikes us as nothing strange that over all Christendom, after every six days of toil, comes one of intermission, devoted to rest by common consent. But surely it is a most impressive thought that thus over all the earth, from Labrador to the Coral Isles, from India in the East to the Kocky Mountains in the West, this Day of Rest is kept — kept by people of many different races — Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Teutonic, Slav; of many different creeds — Protestant, Latin Church, Greek Church, and kept through age after age, as far back as history carries us. What is the exjDlanation of this observance ? Whence this common consent ? Does it rest on any authoritative basis ? If so, what is that basis ? Is it a basis laid down by human authority or Divine ? Where is that authority discoverable ? What is its history ? How far back does it extend ? How widely does it reach ? What is the exact nature of its requirements ? These are the topics now to be discussed. They are topics of widely reaching interest. They concern the antiquarian, the theologian, the historian, the social economist, the phil- anthropist. Not one of their domains is untouched by this marvellous Sabbath institution. But it con- cerns more than these — it concerns every man to know is he called upon to observe a weekly day of rest — if so, by what authority and with what manner of ob- 4 02t7' Rest-Day. servance, and for what ends ? Why, to recur to our illustration, this septenary streak of white after the six of dusky black ? Into this inquiry I invite the reader to accompany me. Let us endeavour to divest ourselves of all pre- judice or bias on the question, in one direction or other. Let us only desire to know what is the truth. It concerns us to know it. Interests of the vastest importance depend on the knowledge, and on the carrying of that knowledge into practice. Let us throw open all the windows of the soul to all the light we can find. Let us breathe a prayer as we do so, that He who himself is Light may shine in upon us, that in His light we may see light on this great sub- ject, and may learn truly what is His will regarding it! To avoid confusion or misapprehension, let it be understood at the outset, that in this essay certain things are assumed. It is assumed, for instance, that there is a God, and that this God has spoken to us in the Bible — the Word of God. If there are any among the readers of these pages who traverse either or both of these positions, we cannot here stay to argue with them. Our inquiry proceeds on a Theistic basis, and on a Biblical basis. The fact of the existence of God implies the authority of God. Supreme authority is involved in the very idea of a Supreme Being. It is His to command. Being God, He will command no- thing but what is right. It is for His creatures to obey, satisfied that implicit obedience is. at once their duty and their interest. Therefore, if He has spoken, as He has, in the Bible, whatever He has declared there is most surely to be believed, because it is so declared, and whatever He has indicated as His will is most carefully to be obeyed, because it is His will. Moreover, that revelation of His is to be taken in its plain grammatical meaning. Its histories are neither to be transmuted into myths nor allegories. Its Poshdates. 5 statements are not to have read into them non -natural senses, such as similar statements in any other book would never be subjected to. The fact that this Bible is a revelation for man, therefore intended surely to be understood by man, so far as he is capable of under- standing it, is to be kept in view. No doubt there may be expected in it things " hard to be understood." The fly, which creeps over the enriched capital of the splendidly carved cathedral column, can as little com- prehend all the proportions of the vast edifice in which he walks, as man all the greatness of the Temple of Inspiration. But this he can comprehend, and must believe, that this Book of Inspiration is not a mockery, professing to give him what in reality it does not, keeping the word of promise to the ear but breaking it to the hope, putting into his hands a revelation of the will of his God which in reality no revelation, but a mystical, allegorical, obscure utterance, out of which when he strives to extract the plain meaning which its plain words bear upon their face — he is told he has extracted a meaning which is not there. The Bible, being God's book for man, man must be able, by the exercise of the powers with which that God has en- dowed him, to comprehend it, else it ceases to be a revelation — an unveiling of the mind of God, and sinks to the level of Delphic or Dodonian oracles, with its characteristics like theirs, equivocation and ambiguity. Postulating these necessary things — the existence of a God and the reality of a revelation, we proceed with our inauirv. CHAPTER II. "HOW OLD ART THOU?" tAKING up the Bible, and opening it at its first book, we find that it commences (as we should ^-^ naturally expect a book intended for the in- struction of man in God's will to commence) with an account of the creation of the world in which we dwell. We are told in this account that the world is a created world, not a self-evolved one, and that its Creator was God. The manner and order of this creation are then described. We are told that the work occupied the Divine Artificer for six days. On the sixth the crea- tion of man took place. Earth, over which he was to have dominion, and which was to be his home, being made and fully furnished, he is introduced into his destined dwelling, and receives directions as to his care of it and of himself. So that wondrous week terminates, and we read — "And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made " (Gen. ii. 2-3). Or, as the passage literally rendered from the Hebrew would read — " Then finished God on the seventh day his work which he had made, and rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. Then blessed God the seventh day and hallowed it, because in it he had rested from all his work which created had God to make." After Creation, 7 Here is a plain statement — plain at least thus far, that it indicates a certain action on the part of the Almighty, and a certain purpose. Some things about these opening chapters of the Scriptures may not be plain. Science and theology may not be able yet to see precisely how God's two revelations, that whose pages are the rocky strata of the Stone-Book, and these pages written with ink by His inspiration, precisely lit into each other. Two independent witnesses, they give their separate accounts of the earth's past, both leading up to a beginning, and neither contradicting the other. Being both Divine, the AVork and the Word proceeding from the same hand, they could not contra- dict each other. But where the one record fits into the other, opinions may and do differ. With which of the great geological periods does such and such a day in Genesis correspond ? Does it correspond precisely with any of them ? Where in the Genesis story is the parallel passage to this in the Earth story, or is there an exact parallel passage to it there at all — does it not belong to some interval not spoken of there ? — these and such-like questions are relevant and permissible, for the record in Genesis makes no statement as to its points of correspondence with the record in the rocks. But no question is permissible or possible as to this fact — that after six days of work " God rested on the seventh day," nor as to this other, that, in addition, " He blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it He had rested from all His work." There is a plain statement, which, unless words were intended really to conceal and not to reveal thought, clearly conveys to the reader, and, because it conve^^s, must have iDcen intended to convey to him, that the Creator, having spent six days in work, devoted the seventh to rest, and, because He did so, " blessed and sanctified " that day. We are, of course, aware that some have interpreted 8 Our Rest-Day, these " days " in this opening portion of Genesis as not ordinary days of twenty-four hours each, but periods of indefinite length. This view is not a modern one Many people are under the impression that it is to the discoveries of geology that it owes its origin. The fact, however, is not so. Long before the researches of the palaeontologist had caused the first chapter of the Pen- tateuch to be re-studied in the light which they had shed on the early history of of the world, men like Josephus and Philo among the Jews, and Descartes and Whiston among Christians, held that these Mosaic days were long periods. More than one modern name of eminence can be quoted in supjDort of this theory. It does not fall within the scope of our inquiry to discuss it. Un- doubtedly the word day is used in Scripture in various senses. In Daniel it means a year. Even among our- selves, if we m'ake the sun the arbiter of its length, we must remember that at the poles the sun sets on the 25th of September and does not rise again till the 16th of March, and at another time of the year he does not disappear for weeks together below the horizon. If we adopt the day-period theory, we do not, say its ad- vocates, at all lose the force of the argument for the Sabbath which has been drawn from the Scripture now before us. Hugh Miller, in his " Testimony of the Rocks," maintains this position, arguing that as it is a seventh portion of time that is claimed for God, that seventh portion remains demandable whether the Gen- esis day be long or short. " It has been urged," he says, " that this scheme of periods is irreconcilable with that Divine ' reason ' for the institution of the Sabbath, which He who appointed the day of old, has in His goodness vouchsafed to man. I have failed to see any force in the objection. God the Creator, who wrought during the six periods, rested during the seventh period, and, as we have no evidence whatever that He recommenced His work of creation, TJie Day-Peinod Theory. 9 as, on the contrary, man seems to be the last formed of creatures, God may be resting still. The presumption is strong that His Sabbath is an extended period, not a natural day, and t]iat the work of Redemption is His Sabbath-day's work. And so I cannot see that it in the least interferes with the integrity of the reason ren- dered, to read it as follows — Work during six periods and rest on the seventh ; for in six periods the Lord created the heavens and the earth, and in tlie seventh period He rested. The Divine period may have been very great — the human periods very small ; just as a vast continent or the huge earth itself is very great, and a map or geographical globe is very small. But if in the map or globe the proportions be faithfully main- tained, and the scale, though a minute one, be true in all its parts and applications, we pronounce the map or globe, notwithstanding the smallness of its size, a faith- ful copy. Were man's Sabbath to be kept as enjoined, and in the Divine proportions, it would scarcely inter- fere with the logic of ' the reason annexed to the fourth commandment,' though in this matter, as in all others in which man can be an imitator of God, the imitation should be a miniature one."* Happily it is not required of us that in these pages we should adjudicate on the merits of this theory. Certain difficulties suggest themselves regarding it to the ordinary reader of Scripture. Wh}^, for instance, are " evening " and " morning " mentioned in speaking of the days, if ordinary days are not intended ? Why does the group of days precisely amount to a week, if the days are not really the days of a week, but great ages ? If each of the six days, again, is a long age, then the seventh must be the same, and the question arises and demands an answer — in what sense has it iDeen " blessed and sanctified ? " It is, we must sup- * "Testimony of the Rocks." lo Our Rest- Day, pose, still in progress. We are probably living in it. How is it blessed and sanctified beyond those which preceded it ? It would divert us too far from our pro- per purpose to inquire into these difficulties. One thing, however, is clear, and that one thing is all that is necessary for our purpose. We have here a Rest- day, observed by the Divine Being, and not only ob- served by Him, but blessed and sanctified by Him. What is this, we ask any unprejudiced reader, but the institution by Divine example of the Sabbath Day, and the setting apart of that Sabbath Day for holy uses by mankind ? It has been argued, indeed, that we have in the verses which we have quoted from Genesis, only an instance of the figure of speech called prolepsis. Paley, in his " Moral and Political Philosophy," after citing the pas- sage, says — " The words do not assert that God then blessed and sanctified the seventh day, but that He blessed and sanctified it for that reason, and if any ask why the Sabbath or sanctification of the seventh day was then mentioned, if it was not then appointed, the answer is at hand — the order of connection, and not of time, introduced the mention of the Sabbath in the history of the subject which it was ordained to com- memorate." But Avhere, we ask, is there any hint in the narrative of anything of the kind ? On Paley's principles, we must read the passage somewhat thus — " On the seventh day God ended His work which He had made, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. And, many years afterwards, God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it." But such an interpretation really amounts to an interpolation. It alters the passage. To get Paley's meaning into it, we must insert additional words. Once admit such a mode of dealing with Scripture, or of dealing with any other book, and we may bid farewell to certainty regarding any autl^-^r's mean- Intended for Man. 1 1 ing. Take the other Edenic ordinance, marriage — how could we tell, on Paley's principles, that it was instituted in Eden ? The account given of its insti- tution may be proleptical as well as that given of the institution of the Sabbath. No history could stand if subjected to such treatment. The plainest and most unvarnished statement might be so twisted and dis- torted as to bear a meaning the exact contrary of that intended by its author. Leaving this, however, we proceed to make the fol- lowing remarks on this first Sabbath. Evidently the institution was intended for man. Because — (a.) God needed no rest for Himself. "The ever- lasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary." In His resting, therefore. He cannot have had a view to Himself. He must have had a view to man whom he had just made. This will further appear if we reflect that — (5.) The very first day whose dawn man saw was the Day of Rest. He was brought into being on the sixth day of the creation week. The Sabbath was in- stituted on the seventh. *' The first sunrise that our first parents saw, Dawned on their day of consecrated rest, Of all days, even in Paradise, the best ; From such original that gift we draw ; ' And wedded love, even like the Sabbath law, Ordained in Eden, has outlived the Fall ; And these the bliss of Paradise recall Even in the wilderness. " It was not given to the world before he came into being, because it was not needed, and might have been misunderstood as not for him. It was not given after the lapse of an interval, lest again he should mistake its purpose and application and meaning. But imme- diately after his creation it is presented to him, that his first entire day of life may be given to God, the 12 OiLv Rest- Day. first fruits of all his time, that he may learn impress- ively his obligation to God on his very entrance into being, and learn also the truth afterwards put into words by the Lord of the Sabbath — " The Sabbath was made for man." (c.) The Sabbath was given to the first father of the human race. Not to Abraham, the father of the Jews. If it had been, there might have been ground for the cry — the Sabbath is a mere Jewish institution. But it is given to Adam, the father of .Jew and Gentile alike, the father of us all, No doubt the institution was subsequently re-given to the Jews, with fresh sanctions and penalties, as marriage, its twin Edenic sister, was also re-given. But as no one will attempt to argue that the re-enaction of the marriage law, in a Jewish form, for Jews, does away with the original gift of wedlock to all mankind through their first parents, so neither can the same be properly argued of the Sabbath. It was to man the gift was originally made, and unless it can be shown (which no one has yet done, and no one can) that the gift has been re- voked, we must rank it among the gifts of God which are " without repentance." {d}) In consonance with all this comes in our Lord's declaration — " The Sabbath was made for man." In another part of this essay this text will be fully com- mented on and its exegesis traced. Here, taking but one limb of the antithesis, I lay stress upon that broad statement — " made for man " — not for God, who needed it not, but for man ; — not for unf alien angels, who have the better Sabbath of the upper sanctuary, but for man ; not for the fallen spirits, " Sabbathless Satan," as Charles Lamb strikingly calls him, and the legions of the pit, where no sweet Day of Rest ever breaks in upon the eternal woe, but for man, universal man ; not for Jewish man, nor Gentile man ; not for savage man, nor civilised man; not for fallen man, nor unf alien ^^ Blessed''' and *' Sanctified.'^ 13 man ; not for Eastern races to the exclusion of Western, nor for Western to the exclusion of Eastern ; but for jnan, for the race, so that wherever there is a human being on God's broad earth, that man can claim his Sabbath rest, and whosoever deprives him of it robs both him and God. (e.) The same truth also appears from the phrase- ology of the verses in Genesis which we are consider- ing. It is not only said God "rested," but He "blessed" the day and "sanctified" it. Now God's action of resting on the day would, we believe, have been sufficient warrant for our keeping it as He kept it. Why should He have divided His creative work over that precise portion of time, working six days and then resting^ one, if not to oive His creatures a specimen of the kind of weeks He wished them to keep, divided after the same model and occupied in the same manner ? Can any other good reason be given for His action ? It is a valid argument that the example of our Lord and His Apostles in observing the First Day of the week as the Lord's Day is suffi- cient warrant for our observing it. The advocates of the Dominical theory hold that that example is the charter of the day, which they dissociate altogether (most wrongly, as we hope to show further on) from the Sabbath of the Old Testament. Why should they lay such stress on the example of the Master and His Apostles after the Resurrection, and refuse all weight and significance to the example of the Divine Being after Creation ? If, on their theory, the former ex- ample establishes a Lord's Day, why not the latter ? Why attribute meaning and purpose to the one act and refuse meaning and purpose to the other act per- formed by the same Being under circumstances so similar ? But, in addition to resting on that first Sabbath, the / Creator "blessed" and "sanctified" the day. What/ 14 Our Rest- Day, was the meaning of these actions ? A blessing, it is to be noted, had been previously given to man on his creation, and to other living creatures. The account given of those blessings may help us to understand the nature of this. In Gen. i. 22 it is said of the living creatures which the water brought forth — "God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth." Again in Gen. i. 28, on the creation of man, it is said " God blessed them and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." These two blessings, therefore, evidently consisted in constituting these two portions of His creation His agents for the performance of the duties given them to do, and bestowing upon them His benediction in the performance of these duties. When He blessed the Sabbath, He simply, 'mutatis "mutandis, did the same for it. He constituted it a vehicle of blessing to mankind, and stamped it with His approval as such a vehicle. But He not only blessed but " sanctified " the day. What is this sanctification ? Just what it is when the word is used of the Tabernacle and its vessels in the latter books of Moses. It is said in Exodus that these were to be " sanctified." And the Hebrew word used there is the same as here in Gen- esis, t^Hi^. It is generally agreed that this word, when used of the Tabernacle and its furniture, means to set apart to a holy use. You cannot communicate a moral quality to an insensate utensil. But you can dedicate it to a holy service. This was done with the Taber- nacle and its vessels, and obviously the word has the same meaning when applied to the Sabbath. God sanctified the Sabbath by setting it apart to sacred uses for all time — sacred uses for man, for his own good and his Maker's glory. If all this do not amount to the institution of a weekly Sabbath for man in all time coming — this The Fourth Co7nmandment, 15 Divine example, this Divine blessing, this Divine sanctitication, so expressly and so expressively nar- rated — then we do not fear to assert that we fail to see what intelligible meaning or purpose is to be ex- tracted from the narrative. Nor can we see how, when the Creator wished to establish a Day of Rest, He could have done so by any action or any words, if the words and the action of this narrative do not amount to such an establishment. If they do not do it, what others would ? (/.) Let us now link on this Genesis narrative to the Fourth Commandment of the Decalogue, as God Himself has in the Commandment linked it on, and see how the case stands. In a subsequent section we shall consider this Commandment at length, in its character, and its intention, and reach, as a command- ment of the Decalogue. Here we merely notice how the view which we have given of the meaning of the Divine rest on the first Sabbath, and the Divine bless- ing and sanctification of it, is borne out in the com- mandment. It expressly bases man's Sabbath rest on that rest of God. " Remember the Sabbath day," it says, " to keep it holy — six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work : but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man- servant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is witliin thy gates : for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested tlte seventh day: ivherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and halloived it." The Sab-I batic rest of the Creator is expressly made the argu-' ment for the Sabbatic rest of the creature, and the significance which that rest had from the first is ex- pressly given to it in legal form. A strong a fortiori argument for the universal and continual observance of the Sabbath can be built upon 1 6 Ou7^ Rest- Day. this fact of its original institution. If it was needed in those early days of the world's existence, when men had no sin, no sorrow, no harassing toil, no cark- ing care, to burden and weary mind and body — when every day was, in a sense, a Sabbath — how much more is it needed now by a world steeped to the lips in business, and drawn incessantly aAvay from God by the enticements of the evil heart ! If in the first century, A.M., it was needed, when the Creator was constantly walking among His then little family of mankind, how much more is it demanded by this nine- teenth century, A.D., with its incessant din of business drowning the sound of the holy voices which speak to the soul ! Who shall say that for a Sabbath fenced in by the same Divine sanctions as guarded the primeval Sabbath, there is not now a need as much stronger as this age is more drawn away from the love and service of the Creator, and from its own peace and quiet rest by its own insatiable appetites, and by the demands of modern civilisation ? If God provided in the beginning"^ for the lesser need, are we to say that He has now left us in our greater, uncared for by the same beneficent legislation which in the beginning so mercifully blessed Adam and his children ? Who that has any knowledge of the love of God will say so ? (/7.) The fact that in this rest of the Creator upon the first Sabbath, and in the concomitant blessing and sanctification of the day we have the institution of the Sabbath, is further borne out by the incidental traces of a septenary division of time which we meet with from creation onwards. Those to which we refer are such statements as that Cain and Abel presented their offerings before God " at the end of days " (Gen. iv. 3,, margin), (what days, if not some known and familiar series ?) — that God observed the weekly interval in the preparations for the Deluge (Gen. vii. 4, 10) — that Noah observed the same interval while in the ark Origin of the Week. 17 (Gen. viii. 10, 12) — that wedding festivals were accus- tomed to last for a week (Gen. xxix. 27), and funeral ceremonies for the same period (Gen. 1. 10) — that the passover feast lasted a week (Exod. xii. 3-20) — and that the Sabbath was a well-known institution at the time of the fall of the manna, before the Decalogue was given (Exod. xvi. 22-30). Whence did this sep- tenary division come ? Whence this week ? All our other great divisions of time are suggested by Nature — day and night by sunrise and sunset — the month by the moon's period — the year by the cycle of the sea- sons. But whence the week ? Some would have us believe that it is merely the period of one of the lunar changes. But these periods are not periods of precisely seven days. This explanation therefore will not hold. As little will that which refers this septenary divi- sion of time to the number of the seven planets. What did they know in those primeval ages of the number of the planets ? The fact is, we can find no possible explanation of the existence of the week save that which bases it on the existence of the Sabbath. If we take the plain meaning of the Scripture records, all is clear. If, in our dislike of them, we fly to any theory which will enable us to dispense with the information which they supply, we only land ourselves in confusion and mistake. One more point and this portion of our argument will be complete. It is the uniform representation of Scripture that our Blessed Lord was identified with the Father in creation work. As examples of passages which assert this, the reader is referred to such Scrip- tures as — Col. i. 16 — "By Him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers ; all things were created by Him and for Him," — Heb. i. 2 — " His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He B 1 8 Oitr Rest- Day, made the worlds," — John i. 3 — " All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made." What a light these passages throw on that remarkable utterance of the Master — " The Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath " (Mark ii. 28) ! Leaving out of account for the present the part taken by the Father and the Holy Spirit in Creation work, -and confining our attention to the Son's action, which we are told by the passages just referred to was an all-pervading action, so much so that, " without Him was not anything made that was made," — we see how and why and to what extent He was the Sabbath's Lord. He made it. It is His appointment. He first sanctioned and sanctified it by His example. There- fore He can interpret it, alter it, use it as He pleases. Especially, when He comes to earth as the legate of heaven, what He does and says regarding it has all the authority of a law of the Creator. A careful study, then, of Holy Scripture and of the early history of mankind, must lead the unprejudiced inquirer to the undoubted conclusion that the Sabbath dates from Creation. It is no new religious appoint- ment. It is the oldest sacred institution in the world — thousands of years older than the Decalogue, older than the Bible itself, older than its twin Edenic relic — marriage, only a little younger than this old earth. The hoary rime of thousands of years is on thy head, O blessed Sabbath! Old, yet art thou still young — no trace upon thee of eflfeteness or decay, and as beautiful as ever thou wast — * ' Time writes no wrinkle on tliine azure brow ; Such as Creation's dawn beheld thee first, thou shinest now." 1 CHAPTER III TBACES OF THE SABBATH IN ANCIENT LANDS AND LITERATURES. ► ■» jT T may be said — if the Sabbath was instituted im- llf mediately after creation, and given to mankind to be observed ever after, one should expect to find traces of its existence and observance in other books than the Bible and among other peoples than those whose life is there recorded. No doubt we should. Of course, as we know from sacred story, the knowledge of God became dim at a very early period of the world's history, and these traces of a Sabbath may therefore be expected to be dim like- wise, and impregnated with corrupt notions. Still there ought to be such traces more or less clear. And there are. Let me proceed to put some of them before the reader. That a sacred seventh day was known to the Greeks at a very early period, a considerable series of quota- tions from Homer, Hesiod, Linus and Callimachus can be adduced to prove. In Homer, whose date was about 900 B.C., we find the following — " 'E^dofiaTT] 5' i]Tre era KaTrfKvdev \epov ^/xap : " Then came the seventh, the sacred day. " "E;S5o/i77 9jP iepri : " The seventh (day) was sacred. ** "EjSSoyUoi' TJfxap ^7}v koI tw TeriXearo airavTa : " It was the seventh day wherein all things were finished. " 'E^do/JLaTT] 5' TjOL Xiiropiev p6ov e^ Ax^pouros : " We left the flood of Acheron on the seventh day. 20 Our Rest- Day, 1 In Hesiod, whose date was about 800 B.C., the fol- ' lowing occur — " n/ocDroj/ ivf], rerpas re, Kal i^do/nr} lepov ^fiap : The first, the fourth, and the seventh days are sacred. " ^E^SofxaTT] d'avTis Xa/xirpbu po5(.TT]. ^ Saturnus. FT]untry are dependent for their water upon an open well, which is fed somewhat slowly. It is visited during the day by the in- habitants, and by night time the supply is low ; but no demands being made upon it during the night, in the morning there is an accumulation of water nearly up to the measure of the begin- ning of the previous day. If it does not, however, gain com- pletely during the night what it has lost during the day, it is plain that it will eventually be all but exhausted. Let us then further suppose that those dependent upon it, knowing this, find it expedient to give the well a periodical rest-day when they will leave it unvisited. The next day finds it full to the brim ; and though day by day the supply diminishes a little, yet it will sus- tain all the demands made upon it until its next Sabbath. Now this is exactly the case with the human frame. If its working powers are to be kept in full and healthy exercise, it must enjoy not only its night's rest, but one day's rest in the seven. ' Al- though,' says Dr. Farre, 'the night apparently equalises the circulation, yet it does not sufficiently restore its balance for the attainment of a long life, hence one day in seven, by the bounty of Providence, is thrown in as a day of compensation to perfect by its rej)ose the animal system.' This is not a guess, nor a speculation, but a i)alpable fact which men of the most opposite creeds, or of no creed, such as the eminent scientist Baron Von Humboldt, and the French socialist Proudhon, assert, and which is attested by every variety of experiment. The conviction of its truth has been forced upon men not willing to confess it, and to whose interest it seemed opposed." — "Rev. A. F. Douglas. " Law " and " Covenant ^ 41 covenant which He had made long previously with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That covenant He founded on His law, which, for clearer understanding, He form- ally recited in a summary form in the Decalogue. Now the Decalogue was not the covenant. It was its basis, not itself. God would have Israel to know the terms on which He would bless them and be their God. Those terms were — a kept law. That covenant with Israel is now abrogated. It is done away in Christ. But the abrogation of the covenant does not abrogate the law. That law existed before the cove- nant, and, as it had a separate and independent exist- ence before it, so it has a separate and independent existence still, though the covenant no longer exists. God did not at Sinai construct the law for the first time. He simply re-stated, in plain, concise terms, a law which had all along, from the beginning, been in force, written on men's hearts, and, though now the Jewish covenant is no more, the law, which was not the covenant, but merely its basis, remains unaffected by its abrogation. The Rhone flows through the Lake of Geneva, and travellers marvel to see it flowing out again, as it flowed in, having preserved in some sort its character as a river all through. It had an inde- pendent course before ever it entered the lake, and it does not lose itself in it. It does not become part of the lake. It is the river still in the lake, and as it existed before it entered it, so it emerges from it again, still an independent existence. So is it with the Decalogue. Its laws, given at Sinai, were not new laws. They had existed from the creation of man. As a Decalogue they are embodied in the Israeli tish covenant. But they emerge from their contact with that covenant unchanged — the same laws as ever — only put into compacter form, and bearing a more authoritative aspect, and, because so briefly and clearly stated, more bindinoj than ever on men's hearts and 42 Our Rest- Day. consciences — their breach more aggravatedly sinful, and their observance a more direct and intelligent act of homage to God, than when they came to man merely as the instinctive, unembodied monitions of His own moral nature. This distinction between law and covenant, if borne in mind, would save us from much confusion and error. (2.) There was something in the circumstances of the giving of the law at Sinai which spoke of per- manence. " God spake all these words." What law, meant to be only transient in its operation, do we read of as being given in that manner? Further, when spoken, He wrote the words, not on papyrus, nor on parchment, but on the most enduring substance obtain- able — on stone — symbol of permanency. Moreover, when so written, he directed them to be deposited within the Ark. That ark was the ark of the cove- nant, and in it they lay as the basis of the covenant, but, more than this, they lay there, as in the safest place of custody that could be found — in the very heart of hearts of the Tabernacle — symbol of the place they should have in the heart of man, in the heart of the Church, in the heart of the world. Is there no teaching in all this ? Who shall say there is not ? (3.) Look now at the contents of the Decalogue. There is not a command in it which contains anything indicating it to be of a temporary nature. Not one. Here it may be convenient to make a slight digression, in order to say a word regarding a distinction which has been made — a useful distinction for our purpose — between laws which are moral and laws which are positive or ceremonial. "A moral law is one which has its foundation in the relationship of man to God, or in the relationship of man to man, or in the con- stitution of human nature itself. A ceremonial law is one which has its basis in the positive command of the Almighty and the propriety of which is justified by ** Moral" and " Positive " Laws. 43 the circumstances in which at a given time men may find themselves placed. A moral law is one which it is possible to discover by the light of nature, and the Tightness of which at once commends itself to the reason and conscience of man. A ceremonial law can- not with certainty be known to be from God except by an oral or a written revelation. A moral law is commanded because it is right in itself, antecedent to all commands. A ceremonial law is right, simply because it is commanded. A moral law is a matter of permanent and universal obligation. A ceremonial law binds those persons only for whom it was intended, and even them it binds no longer than the purpose is served for which it was enacted. A moral law cannot be repealed. But, at any time the law-giver pleases, a ceremonial law may be set aside. The distinction will be best understood by a familar example. As a specimen of a moral law we may name the duty of loving our parents. To those from whom we derive existence we stand in a peculiar relationship). Nature and conscience prompt us to repay them with affection. Had the Bible never been written, it would be no less the duty of a man to love his father and mother. . . . But the same thing could not be said, for example, of that ancient law which forbade a Jew to eat pork. That is strictly a ceremonial law. Unlike the other, it has no foundation in the relationship of a man to his f ellowmen." * Go now through the Ten Commandments and see whether one of them belongs to the latter category, or whether, on the contrary, there is one which is not plainly of the former. Take the First. Under which head are we to write the words — " Thou shalt have no * "The Sabbath not a Church Hohday, but a Divine Ordi- nance under all Dispensations." By the Rev. Thomas Witherow, D.D. , Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Magee College, Londonderry. Belfast, 1871. 44 Our Rest- Day, other gods before me ? " What race or nation on earth can claim exemption from that law ? What age of man's history has not been subject to its operation ? Nay, what rank of the heavenly intelligences them- selves is not bonncl by it ? That commandment has its foundation in the very fact that God is God, and can never be repealed. It can never at any time be right to have any God but God, or to give to any other the worship and glory which are due to Him alone. What man will dare to say that this command is abro- gated ? What man will dare to say that it ever can be abrogated ? Tnke the Second. It forbids all image-worship. Is it Jews only that need that law — Jews only that can violate it — Jews only that are bound to keep it ? Is it binding upon no one unless he has been brought out of tlie land of Egypt — out of the house of bondage ? WJiere there is no law, there can be no transgression. Where this law is not in force, there can be no idolatry. Who shall say that it is so ? Who shall dare to go to the teeming realms of heathendom, and, standing in the idol-temple, and seeing the gods many and lords many which receive the homage of the ignorant wor- shippers, proclaim that this law is abrogated ? Go to the Third — " Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." Is that a commandment which it was ever right to break — which it ever can be right to break ? Is it not a law binding in heaven, on earth, binding for all time and all eternity ? Who shall say that it is abrogated ? Who shall say that it can be or ought to be ? We now come to the Fourth Commandment, with which we are specially concerned. Note that we only reach it now. As if the great Legislator had foreseen the attempts which would be made to get rid of it, it is entrenched in the very heart of the Decalogue, so that one must get rid of Monotheism, must deny the Permanence of the Fourth Co77ima7idment. 45 permanence of the prohibition of image-worship, must admit that the law against the profanation of the Creator's name is abrogated, before he can plead for the repeal of the Sabbath law. Or, if he approach it from behind, he must get rid of the Divine prohibi- tions of injuries to man's person, property, and char- acter, and must weaken the defences of all virtue, before he can lay a finger on the law of the Day of Rest. Is this remarkable position an accident ? Has this law been put in its place at random ? And has God inserted a temporary law along with a body of others which are admitted to be permanent ? Is the Fourth an exception to all the rest of the Command- ments ? How does it come that it is in a code, every other provision of which is admitted to be obligatory, if it alone has lost its force and its authority ? There is here a crux wliich it will be difficult indeed for any sophistry to get over. * Looking more closely at the commandment, who shall say that in its main features and in the duties which it inculcates, the fourth is not as plainly a per- manent ordinance as any of the other nine ? If God alone is to be worshipped — if that worship is not to be ordered after man's own devices but according to His will — if it is to be a reverent and holy worship, must there not be a time set apart for it ? Does not the law written on our hearts tell us that there should be. More than that, does not the same law tell us that God has the right, if He so pleases, to fix the amount of that portion, and that, where He fixes it, it is our duty to obey His command ? What is there in all this of a merely Jewish character ? But it may be said — it has been said — " We do not deny all this. We do not question the permanent ob- ligation of all the precepts now enunciated. What we * It is worthy of notice that the Fourth Commandment occupies nearly one third of the entire space taken up by the Decalogue. 46 Onr Rest-Day, deny is that they have this permanent obligation be- cause they are contained in the Decalogue. Any law in the Decalogue which is not contained somewhere in the New Testament we refuse to acknowledge. Before that authority and that authority alone we will bow." The motto of Protestantism used to be — " The Bible, and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants." But it seems that some people have now narrowed their faith to less than half of the Holy Book. Be it so. We are ready to meet them on their own ground. For we submit that the whole Decalogue is recognised in the New Testament as binding. We open the book at Mat. xix. 17. We find there an account of a young man who comes to Christ seeking guidance. How does He direct him ? He jooints him to the Decalogue. He says — " If thou wilt enter into life, keep the Com- mandments." The young man, desiring certainty as to the Great Teacher's exact meaning, says, " which " commandments ? Our Lord, in reply, recites to him several specimen commandments of the Decalogue, in the very words of the Decalogue. That does not look very like the abrogation of the Ten Commandments. Or we go to the Sermon on the Mount, that incompar- able piece of teaching, which those who oppose us on this question are never weary of telling us breathes the true spirit of New Testament Christianity. What does the Master say there regarding this question ? Let us hear Him. "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law ... I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot (one yod, a small letter of the Hebrew alphabet) or one tittle (one heraia, a minute turn of a letter in the same alphabet) shall in no wise pass from the Law till all be fulfilled." That does not look very like the abrogation of the Law surely. But He says more. "Whosoever shall break one of these least Commandments, and shall teach men so (the command- Teaching of the Apostles, 47 ments of this Law of the Old Testament), he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven ; but who- soever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." That does not look very like the repeal of the Commandments surely. Nor is this all. He proceeds to quote soni^ of the commandments of the Decalogue, in the very words of the Decalogue, shedding new light upon them, till they shine and glow with His own sj^irit. Any one can read all this for himself in Mat. v. 17, etc. It is marvellous that any man can do so and still say that the Decalogue is abolished, or that we have nothing to do with it in New Testament times. From the personal teaching of our Lord regarding the Decalogue we pass to that of His Apostles. First of all let us hear what the great Apostle of the Gentiles has to say on the matter. We open at Eom. xiii. 8, and we find him quoting several of the Commandments. Does he say we have nothing to do with them ? — that they are out of date ? — that we have outgrown them ? Nothing of the kind. He tells us in effect, as any one may see for himself by consulting the passage, that we have still to keep them, and he shows us how. In Ephes. vi. 2, he quotes one of them again, the fifth, calls it a commandment, and urges obedience to it. St. Paul evidently had the most thorough belief in the binding force of the Decalogue. We go next to the Apostle James. In his Epistle {ii. 10,) he speaks of " the law," and he leaves us in no doubt as to what law he means. He quotes the laws of the Decalogue, in the very words of the Decalogue. Not a hint of those laws having become obsolete! Quite the contrary — an enforcment of them, and an explanation of them as still binding. " Whosoever," he says, " shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one , point, he is guilty of all. For He that said ' Do not / commit adultery,' said also ' Do not kill.' Now if thou J 48 Our Rest-Day . commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor o£ the law." St. James had obviously no idea of the abrogation or abolition of the Decalogue. This is the teaching of the New Testament. We challenge any one to show one solitary statement from it in a contrary direction. There is no such statement. If we submit to its authority, there can be no question that the law of the Ten words is still a law for us. " Oh ! but," it is argued, " is it not said, ' We are not under the law but under grace ? ' How does that statement consist with the doctrine you are now laying down ? " Now it has been well said, " The meaning of the Bible is the Bible." What then is the meaning of this oft-quoted text ? It cannot possibly mean that Christians have no concern nor connection with the Decalogue, and unless it means this, its quotation in the present connection is useless. But that it cannot mean this, is clear. Apostles would not cite the com- mandments of the Decalogue, and comment on them, and enforce them, as they have done, if we had no concern with them. They would not stultify them- selves by contradicting their own teaching. If any one will attentively consider the whole of the passage in which the words now referred to occur, he will see their true meaning at once, and will never employ them again to support the dogma of the abolition of the Decalogue. They mean that we are not under the law as " a covenant of works." No salvation is attain- able by the law. By its deeds " shall no flesh living be justified." But that is a very different thing from saying that we have nothing to do with it. It is a rule of life, as the apostles are careful to remind us over and over again, and that is precisely the point we are contending for. A child is not a slave. But the child does not differ from the slave in this — that the one is under law and the other not. The child is bound to obey its father just as much as the servant. Liberty and License. 49 The motives of obedience in the two cases and tlie spirit of obedience may be different ; but both must obey. The Christian is a child of God. Is he there- fore absolved from obeying his Father ? To ask that question is to answer it. But it is sometimes arofued, ao;-ain, that it is incon- sistent with the freedom and spirituality of the New Economy that we should be trammelled by this Deca- logue. Love, not law, reio-ns now, we are told. We are " called unto liberty." This notion, however, proceeds on entirely false views of what liberty really is. Liberty is not free- dom from the control of law. That is license, not liberty, as John Milton long ago pointed out. True liberty, instead of resenting the presence of law, de- mands and rejoices in it. The free peoples of the^ world are the law-abiding peoples. The truth is — in ( all God's dominions law rules. In the physical world and the spiritual alike we find the "reign of law.'* Whether or not, as Professor Drummond aronies, natural law reig-ns in the spiritual world, law of some kind certainly does. Law is the government of God, and there is no part of creation exempt from that government. To use Jonathan Edwards's strong ex- pression, it would be to " ungod God " to believe so. Some have thoughtlessly ch-awn an argument against the present binding nature of the Decalogue from the words of its Preface : — " I am the Lord thy God that brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." They say, "We were never in either the land of Egypt or the house of bondage — what therefore can we have to do with a law which begins thus ? " Now this argument either proves too much or too little. If the Commandments bind none but those literally brought up out of Egypt, then they did not bind even all the Jews, but only the generation of the Exodus. But if they bind all Israel, then if St. D 50 Oii7' Rest -Day. Paul argues correctly, Christians are of the true Israel. *' We are the circumcision/' he says. Let any one read his argument on this subject in the Epistle to the Romans, and he must see that we in this economy are identified with the Jews in a very real manner — that we are now before God the true Israel, and any argu- ment, therefore, which is brought against the Com- mandments, on the ground of the Jewish cast of the Preface, recoils on those who use it. To only one other argument on this part of the subject do we deem it necessary to allude. It is said that Christ, having by His atoning work satisfied the law of God — that laAV is gone, for us, for ever. The text is quoted — " Having blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us." Now this argu- ment is simply based on a confusion of thought. Suffering the penalty of a law does not surely abolish that law. Nor does perfect obedience. But these two things constitute what Christ did. He rendered a perfect obedience to the law and He bore for His people its utmost penalty. Neither of these two works of His, nor both of them together, amount to anything like the abolition of the law. When a crimi- nal suffers on the scaffold, that means something very different from the abolition of the law against which he has offended. It surely means the exact contrary. It manifests the strength of the law. No doubt Christ has " blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us and has taken it out of the way, nail- ing it to His cross." The reference in this fine passage is to the practice in Palestine, of a creditor, when his debt was discharged, driving a nail through the bond, to signify that it was cancelled. Christ has done that The ransom has been paid for us and is not to be paid over again hy us. But that act of His only " magni- fies the law and makes it honourable," and just in proportion as we appreciate the greatness of the Re- The Repeal of the Decalogue. 5 1 deemer's work and enter into its spirit, will we like Him continually honour the law of God in our hearts and lives, not saying that we will have nothing to do with it, but following in His footsteps in this as in all things, and striving to uphold it to the best of our power. '*' The truth of the matter regarding the Decalogue is simply this — not only has it not been repealed, but it could not be. The laws contained in it were in exist- ence before it was promulgated, and they shall be in existence till this world comes to an end. " You could not make a grosser mistake than to suppose that the moral law was given to the world for the first time only when, upon the summit of the burning mount, the tables of stone were marked by the finger of God. Then for the first time the law was committed to writing ; but the law was in existence and men were subject to it ages before it found expression upon the tables of stone. Where men are not under law it is of course impossible to break law. ' Where there is no law there is no transgression.' But no man who reads the Scriptures can fail to observe that from Adam to Moses there was transoTession enouo^h. That the law was then broken and that men were punished for breaking it proves that the law then existed. Did not Eeuben break a law when he * went up to his father's bed ? ' Did not the sons of Jacob break a law 1 when they hated their brother and sold him for a slave ? Did not Rachel break a law when she stole her father's images ? Did not the progenitors of Abraham break a law when they served their idols on the other side of the flood ? Did not Cain break a law when he committed murder ? It is obvious that it was not the Law of Moses which these persons broke, for at the time the latest of them sinned God had not yet spoken from Mount Sinai and Moses was not born. What law did they then break ? The 52 Our Rest- Day, answer is evident — they broke that moral law which God had stamped on the human heart in Paradise, which, though to some extent defaced by the fall, is still discernible by the light of nature, and which till this hour would not relax its claim upon the human race even though Sinai had never thundered and Moses had never spoken and no Jew had ever been heard of in the world." * No doubt we read the Ten Commandments now in New Testament light, and read into them a New Testament spirit. We do not stand trembling before " the mount that might be touched and that burned with fire." Calvary, rising over against Sinai, has transfigured it. We look upon God's laws not as our foes but as our friends, and upon Himself, not as a hard taskmaster, but as a loving Father. But, never- theless, we do not alter one of those laws. We dare not. Rome, usurping the prerogative of Deity, omits and changes to suit her purposes. We shudder at her audacity. Yet which is worse — the high-handed dar- ing which lifts one of those Divine precepts out of the place which God has assigned to it, or the casuistry which at one fell swoop blots them all out of the Christian statute-book altogether ? Turning now again specially to that Fourth Com- mandment with which we are here specially concerned, we admit at once that, like all the other nine, it is cast in a Judaic mould. The Commandments at Sinai were promulgated primarily to Jews, through a Jewish mediator, and just as a river is tinged by the soil through which it flows, so is the Decalogue. But in saying this we only say what is true of the whole Christian religion. It had a Jewish origin. It arose in Palestine. The New Testament is the development of the Old Testament, as the Old Testament is the root of the New. Christ was a Jew according to the flesh, * Witherow, ui supra. Cast in a Jttdaic Moidd, 53 and by Jews the holy oracles were written. Jerusalem is " the mother of us all," and has left its mark upon the whole Christian Church. If we are therefore to discard the Fourth Commandment, or any other com- mandment, because it wears a certain Judaic aspect, wef must discard more than the Decalogue. We will not^ have much of the Bible, nor much of Christianity left.! But, while cast in this Jewish mould, a calm and I unbiassed consideration of the Fourth Commandment will fail to discover anything in it which should con- fine it to Jews. Let us go through it, and see for our- selves. " Kemember " — that very first word takes the reader back to antecedent times when no distinction^ between Jew and Gentile yet existed, and reminds him that he is not listening to the promulgation of a new law, but to the republication of an old one given long before to the whole of mankind. " The Sabbath Day " — not the seventh day, but the Sabbath Day — the Rest-Day. There is no specification of the precise day to be kept. Room is left for a change of day. The commandment only says — Remember the Rest-Day. " To keep it holy." — Some incautious critics have said that the Fourth Commandment merely prescribes rest — not worship. They have surely forgotten these words. It is a Ifioly resting that the law of the day requires — not a mere indolent relaxation of mind or body, but a rest that has reference to God. " Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work." There is nothing distinctively Jewish here, is there ? Part of the primal curse pronounced on the common father of us all was that in the sweat of his face he should eat bread; and the law of the New Testament is, "He that will not work neither should he eat." " But the seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God." " Ah ! " cries a captious critic, " there is what shows it to be a Jewish precept — the seventh-day Sabbath. How can you ask us to keep the first day on the authority of a 54 Our Rest- Day, commandment which expressly prescribes the keeping of the seventh ? " But stop a moment. The com- mandment does not order the keeping of the seventh day of the week, or any particular day of the week. Let us note what it does order, for its words are like all the words of God, precise and well-chosen. It says that we are to spend six days in our worldly employ- ments, and the seventh day (not of the week, but the day following the six of work) in holy rest. Is not this precisely what the Christian does as well as the Jew ? Does he not labour six days and rest the seventh ? And that is what the Commandment enacts. " In it thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son nor thy daughter." This strict prohibition, we are told, is no longer binding. The Jew was forbidden to do any work whatever on the Sabbath — even to light a fire. But we are not under that obligation. Cer- tainly not. The Commandment says nothing about the lightinsr or not lig-htino- of Sabbath fires, and our Lord explains to us that even the Jews had the fullest liberty under the Commandment to perform all works of necessity and mercy upon the Sabbath, so that there is no difference between our position and theirs in that respect. " Nor the stranger that is within thy gates." This clause, it will be observed, expressly extends the obligations of the Commandment beyond Jews to Gen- tiles. " For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath Day and hallowed it." Is it a Jew only that has rea- son to remember the work of creation ? Is it upon the Jews only that the example of the Great Father of all is to be influential ? Surely not. Surely these words take us all in, Jew and Gentile alike. They take us back ao^ain to the orioinal institution of the Sabbath — to the original reasons for its institution — to that blessinof which hallowed it in the world's Dr. Norman MacleocTs Views. 55 earliest age, long before Abraham's day. From the beginning of the Commandment to the end, therefore, there is not a word necessarily or only Jewish. The word " Jew " does not once occur in it, nor can we find anything in its entire contents which gives the faintest hint that it was intended to be restricted to Jews. Quite the contrary. Dr. Norman Macleod, defending his j)eculiar views on the Sabbath before the Presbytery of Glasgow in , 1865, said that the Sabbath of the Fourth Command- / ment was " from evening to evening," beginning upon / what we should call the Friday evening and ending/ on the Saturday evening. But the Commandment says nothing of the kind, and implies nothing of the kind — says nothing whatever as to either the day of the week or the hours of the day during which it is to be kept. Its wisdom is very apparent just here. It leaves scope for the change of day which came in at the Resurrec- tion of Christ, and it leaves scope too for different countries which have different calendars and different modes of reckoning time. In Iceland, Sunday is reckoned from six o'clock in the evening till six o'clock the next evening. In Russia, for ecclesiastical pur^^oses, the same rule is observed. We, on the other hand, reckon Sunday, as we do any other day, from midnight to midnight. The commandment has nothing whatever to say to all this. It says — Give God one day out of the seven, the seventh after six of work — an entire day of the same length as your other days. That is all. Again, Dr. Macleod argued that those Christians who keep the Fourth Commandment could only keep it " in spirit." We do not hesitate to say that there is not a solitary precept of it which the Christian may not observe to the very letter. The fact that men in some places have gone to an undue extreme of strict- ness in Sabbath keeping no more proves the Jewish character of the Commandment than the far more com- 56 Our Rest- Day, mon extreme of iindue laxity in its observance proves its laxity. What we have to do with is not men's observance of it, but itself. The Commandment is not to be judged by men's observance, but men's observance by the Commandment. Mr. Herbert Spencer has also stigmatised our keep- ing of the Fourth Commandment as Jewish. In his " Study of Sociology," imagining what may be said of our age " by an independent observer living in the far future, supposing his statements translated into our cumbrous language," he observes : " ' In some respects,' says the future observer, ' their code of conduct seems not to have advanced beyond, but to have gone back from, the code of a still more ancient people from whom their creed was derived The relations of their creed to the creed of this ancient people are indeed difficult to understand Not only did they in the law of retaliation outdo the Jews, instead of obey- ing the quite opposite principle of the teacher they worshipped as Divine, but they obeyed the Jewish law and disobeyed their Divine teacher in other ways — as in the rigid observance of every seventh day, which he had deliberately discountenanced Their sub- stantial adhesion to the creed they professedly repu- diated was clearly demonstrated by this, that in each of their temples they fixed up in some conspicuous place the Ten Commandments of the Jewish religion, while they rarely, if ever, fixed up the two Christian commandments given instead of them.' " * Surely this is a most extraordinary passage. Whatever it fails to prove, most certainly it makes clear to us that theology is not Mr. Spencer's forte. We are here concerned only with his reference to the Fourth Commandment, which simply proves that he knows nothing whatever about the subject. We have shown above, that Sab- bath observance is no more a Jewish institution than * *' The Study of Sociology." Mr. Herbert Spencer s Views. 57 honesty or purity, which, we trust, Mr. Spencer does not regard as virtues only to be practised by the chil- dren of Abraham. Perhaps, the most extraordinary part of his statement is that in which he declares that our Lord " deliberately discountenanced " the obser- vance of the Sabbath. The exact contrary is the fact. In nothing was he more careful than in observing it and in showing the correct manner of observing it. There was something in connection with it which he did " deliberately discountenance" — the Eabbinical per- versions of its s]3irit and law which, as He showed the Jews, were not only contrary to the teaching of their own old Testament, but contrary to common sense and common humanity. But as to the Sabbath itself, when we read the biographies of Jesus, when we find Him attendihg public worship regularly on the Sabbath, using the day purposely for so many of His works of mercy, and taking pains to vindicate the true law of the clay, and clear it of the accretions which in His time so entirely obscured its meaning and purpose, and made it a burden instead of a blessing, we can only be surprised at any writer making the statement that Christ " deliberately discountenanced " the observance of every seventh day. One might say with about as much truth that Mr. Herbert Spencer has " deliberately discountenanced" the study of philosophy. We are not surprised, after reading the statement we have referred to, to hear next that Christ gave us two Christian commandments instead of the Ten. No as- sertion could be further from the truth. Our Lord never gave any commandments instead of the Deca- logue, simply for this reason, that He never superseded the Decalogue, but on the contrary, enforced it and emphasised its permanence. The two commandments which He gave, He gave not as substitutes for, but as summaries of, the Ten. He expressly said : " All the laiu is fulfilled" in these two laws. Mr. Spencer's 58 Our Rest-Day, sneer at English Christianity need not trouble us much. It no doubt pleases him and it does it no harm. It is merely the scoff of one who shows that he has not suc- ceeded in even understanding the question of which he writes. Oh no ! The Sabbath was no mere Jewish institution. The Jew needed it. But so does the Gentile, and God, mindful of the universal needs of His creatures, made the Sabbath for "man. First established immediately after his creation — solemnly re-acted in the Decalogue, which is a summary of the entire moral law — carefully cleansed by the Saviour from the defilements which had come to obscure its light and mar its beauty — it has been handed on to us, who, in the anxious competi- tion of our business affairs, and the bustle and feverish haste of our modern life, need it more than ever age that the world has yet seen, and who will be indeed " fools and slow of heart " to perceive our own best in- terests, as well as untrue to the God who has bestowed on us such a precious boon, if we do not still " Remem- ber the Sabbath Day to keep it holy." CHAPTER YI THE DECALOGUE AND THE SABBATH. tN the Decalogue, we have a series of laws for the regulation of man's life. Let us inquire in this chapter how the law of the Sabbath stands among them and in what manner it is related to them. Notice — (1.) First, it is in the Decalogue. It is unquestion- ably one of the Ten Laws that the Sabbath day is to be remembered and kept holy. I submit that, being there, it must stand or fall with the others, and they with it. You cannot begin to pick and choose among these Ten Laws, taking which of them you like, and consigning to oblivion any which do not precisely harmonise with your ideas. You cannot retain the first three, saying, " these commend themselves to me and I will have them and obey them ; " and then, wlien you come to the fourth, say, " Here is one which stands on a different basis, I will have none of it." The Decalogue is a unity. To eliminate one law from it is to lose all. To admit one is to admit all. Change the case. Let it be a question not of divine, but of human, legislation. Are you at liberty to say, " I will submit to some of the laws of this empire, but others I will have nothing to do with ? " You know you cannot. Being a subject of the Queen, you are bound by all the laws which, in conjunction with the other estates of the realm, she imposes. Can we treat the Supreme Government of all otherwise ? The Sabbath law is one of a string of ten precious pearls, threaded to- 6o Our Rest-Day, gether by a Divine hand — " orient pearls/' but not " at random strung." Before you detach one of them from the rest you must cut the string and endanger all. God has joined these ten together. What man shall dare to put them asunder ? * (2.) The position of the Fourth Commandment in the Decalogue is worthy of notice. This position is not a matter of chance. There can be no chance about any arrangement which God makes. He does nothing at random, we may be sure. He is the Author of the order in which He places events or commands, just as much as He is the Author of the events or commands themselves. That order, we may be certain, is an in- tended order, and must be the best order that is pos- sible. Now, the order in which the law of the Sabbath comes in among the rest is remarkable. It does not stand at the end of the Decalogue, else the suggestion might possibly occur to a suspicious mind, or one that did not desire to be under its yoke, that it had got added on by mistake. It does not stand at the begin- ning. If it did, the same suspicion might have arisen regarding its origin. Nor yet do we find it precisely occupying the central position in the code, else restless minds, once they had begun to doubt its validity and to desire to get rid of its authority, might have sug- gested the theory that a Jewish legislator had, with most exact calculation, estimated what was the safest place in which to deposit a spurious law, and put it * The late Dr. Lockbart, of Glasgow, when travelling in Eng- land, was sojourning at an inn when the Sabbath came round. On entering the public room, and about to set out for church, he found two gentlemen preparing for a game of chess. He addressed them to this effect : — "Gentlemen, have you locked up your portmanteaus carefully?" "What! are there thieves in this house ? " "I do not say that," replied the doctor, "only I was thinking that if the waiter comes in and finds you making free with the fourth commandment, he may think of making free with the eighth.^' Position of the Fourth Comviandment. 6 1 there. It stands in a position really stronger than any o£ them. You must pass over and get rid of three most solemn and holy laws before you can reach it from the beginning of the Decalogue. You must get | rid of six most salutary and necessary laws before you / can reach it from the end. In front of it, like three / strong and stalwart sentries, stand the First, and the Second, and the Third Commandments. You must deal with them before you can touch it. At its back stands a rear-guard of six other laws. If you wish to attack it from behind you must first deal with them. There it lies entrenched in the heart of those ten laws, as in a camp, with nine stout and watchful sentinels keeping every point of attack. Like the donjon-keep in the Norman fortress, it holds the key of the posi- tion. Like the keystone of an arch, it is buttressed up on either side by well-chosen and well-fitted stones, and itself, while supported by them, giving them in return their strength. Is there no teaching in all this ? Was it all undesigned ? Has it all come by chance ? If we were dealing with a work of man we might say so. But this is a work of God, who knows the end from the beginning, and disposes, with the utmost exactness, of the lot which men cast at random into the lap. Who shall say either that He gave this position by chance or that it has no meaning and no purpose ? * (3.) Notice again the relations of this Commandment to the others, and theirs to it. It might have hap- pened that the Ten Laws should have had no mutual connection or relation. They might have been ten * "As the original concrete foundation of the great Washing- ton monument was found to be too weak to hold the whole monument and had to be replaced by rock, so we must put under our Sabbath observance the granite of Sinai, the perpetual and universal obligation of the Fourth Commandment, for nothing weaker can stand the pressure of our Nineteenth Century temp- tations to Sabbath desecration." — B.e\). W. F. Crafts^ D.D. 62 Our Rest- Day, separate and distinct decrees, with no further affinity to each other than that all were in the one code and the work of one Author. But it is not so. When we come to look at them, we find that they grow out of and fit into each other in the most beautiful manner. They are ten fruitful branches, springing from one trunk with one common root. Or, like the ten fingers of the human hands, they are formed of the same sub- stance, animated by the same vitality, and feel the beatings of the one great Heart. Let us see how this is. Looking at the Decalogue as a whole, we find that it has two aspects — a God- ward and a man- ward. A complete law for man evi- dently must possess this two-fold character. No man can be right who is not right in both ways, who does not maintain a conscience void of ofience both toward God on the one hand, and toward man, on the other. Take the First Table, which teaches our duty to God. It has in it four laws. The first tells us whom we are to worship, the second and third how we are to wor- ship, the fourth when. The first warns us against polytheism, the second against the sin of idolatry, the third against the sin of profanity, the fourth against the sin of relegating to any time (which might prove to be no time) the duty of adoring the Creator. In the first, God points the worshipper to Himself and demands his homage in opposition to the gods many and lords many of heathenism — in the second He warns him against the sinful practices of those who will only worship when they have a visible represen- tation of their deity — in the third He bids him guard against the corruption into which all mere human worship has a tendency to degenerate, the corruption of mere vain repetition — in the fourth He bids him set apart for his worship a time, lest it should sink into a mere vapid, and general, and indefinite thing. There is thus a great unity in this table. You cannot Relations of the Commandments. 6'}^ displace one of its laws without marring the complete- ness of the whole. By so much as you interfere with one of them, you spoil the beauty of a piece of legis- lation, the equal of which the world has never seen, which left God's hand, like all his works, " perfect and entire, wanting nothing." * Just in the same way, we might show how the six several laws of the Second Table are in like manner mutually related, and stand or fall together. It would be equally easy to illustrate how the Second Table is re- lated to the First, duty to God involving and implying the performanance of duty to man, and vice versa, so that the two revolve round and support each other like binary stars. In addition, it would be specially suitable here to show how the Fourth Commandment, in particular, has a marvellous connection with the re- quirements of the Second Table, there being hardly a sin prohibited there which has not been proved by actual experience to be associated with Sabbath- breaking. But all this is scarcely necessary. A hint regarding it may be sufficient. There are people who would stand aghast at the * A boatman, wliose Christian master had required him to work on the Sabbath, and who had been therefore unrestrained in his vicious tendencies, in his dying moments said to his master, who, at that late hour, sought to speak to him about religion : " You forced me to break one of God's commandments, and when I broke one I thought there was no use in trying to keep the others." Another incident for Sabbath-breaking employers to ponder is the following : The crew of an American vessel in harbour was ordered by the captain to labour on the Sabbath in preparation for a voyage. They refused, assigning as a reason their right to rest on the Sabbath while in the harbour, and to attend to the appropriate duties of that day. The captain dis- missed them and attempted to procure another crew. He applied to several, who refused. He then met an old sailor and asked him if he would ship. " No ! " " Why not ? " " Because a man who will rob the Almighty of His day, I should be afraid would rob me of my wages." 64 Our Rest-Day. very idea of violating any other of the Commandments who look very lightly on a breach of the Fourth. Hint to them the very possibility of their stealing, or lying, or breaking the Seventh Commandment, and they feel insulted at the bare suspicion of such a possibility. But the Fourth has no such sanctity in their eyes. Why ? Who made it to differ from God's other laws ? By whose authority do we place it in a lower position than the rest ? Certainly not by God's. There is no hint, either in itself or anywhere else, to show that He pays less respect to it than to the other nine, or lays less stress upon it. On the contrary, it might be argued that He has a special and particular regard for it. His dealings with Israel showed that He was very jealous of any breach of it. It is worth remembering that the whole of Palestine to-day stands out before the world as a monument of the consequences of the breach of the law of the Sabbath. In Levit. xxvi. God says to Israel, " Ye shall keep my Sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary : I am the Lord." Promises of blessing, if this commandment is obeyed, are then given.* Then the chapter proceeds — " If ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary to me, then I will walk contrary to you also in my fury, and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins . . . and I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you, and your land shall be desolate and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy her Sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate and ye be in your enemies' land, even then shall the land rest and enjoy her Sabbaths — as long as it lieth desolate it * It is proved by statistics that Jews on the Continent have an average of ten years longer hfe than other races. Mr. Jacobs, in a paper read before the Anthropological Institute, attributes their greater longevity in large degree to the observance of a weekly Sabbath. Journal of the Anthropological Institute^ xv. 29, 33. The Fourth Coinmandment a Test. 65 shall rest, because it did not rest in your Sabbaths when ye dwelt upon it." Every traveller, tlierefore, who visits Palestine and brings back to us the descrip- tions of its dreary ruins, of the broken-down terraces on its hill-sides, of its deserted villages and general desolation, with which we are so familiar, is a wit- ness, consciously or unconsciously, to the love which God has for a faithfully kept Sabbath, and to the danger which men and nations incur when they think lightly of Sabbath law. The very fact that the Fourth Commandment seems to the uninstructed mind of less moment than some other precepts of the Deca- logue, and the breach of it a less heinous sin than the breach of others, makes it in some sort a superior test of the spirit of obedience. Is not a command, whose supreme importance and necessit}^ we cannot see as plainly as we do those of others, a better test of our allegiance to God than others whose necessity and im- portance are written on their faces ? To our first parents the eating or not eating of the Forbidden Fruit appeared a light matter. The reason of the prohibition was not plain to them. No reason for it was given by God. They were to obey Him, simply because He bade them. On that very account the command was a better test of their character and obe- dience than one, the intrinsic goodness and the evil consequences of disobeying which would have been more apparent. So with this Fourth Commandment. It may seem to us a matter of smaller moment whether we keep or break it, than whether we keep or break some of the others. But this very fact that its impor- tance and advantages may not be so immediately and conspicuously clear to us, in reality renders it a more solemn and searching test of our loyalty to our great King. There is a special warning in Scripture against him who shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, which ought to be well pon- E 66 Our Rest- Day, dered by all who, weighing the Ten Words in their imperfect balances, come to the conclusion that, if they keep the other nine, they may safely disregard this. We are very far from saying, however, that this commandment is of secondary importance. We there- fore notice — (4.) The character of the Fourth Commandment. The Decalogue begins with three precepts, intended to regulate the homage to be paid to the Divine Being. The last six of its statutes, again, are meant to regulate the duties which we owe to our fellow human beings. Between these two classes of commands comes in the one which we are considering, and it will be observed that it partakes of the character of both. It is a com- mandment which prescribes a duty which we owe to Ood. But there is a secular element in it as well as a sacred, for it not only bids us to rest on the Sabbath, but to work on the other six days of the week. " Six days shalt thou labour" is a portion of the law as binding as "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Therefore this commandment occupies the position of a sort of connecting link between the two tables. This gives it a peculiar strength. It is not •an altogether sacred command, nor yet is it altogether secular. It is both. It is a law for the Day of Rest ; but it is also a law for the day of labour. That man violates it who profanes the Sabbath day. But he violates it too who fritters away the week day. It is a law for all our time, and he who would get rid of the Sabbath must not only remove this commandment out of its strong position in the heart of the Decalogue, but must pick the commandment itself to pieces, keep- ing some of it, and some of it throwing away. With such consummate wisdom has the great Legislator guarded this law, against which He foresaw there would arise not only the opposition of selfishness, but that also of a mistaken theology — ^guarded it not only The Fotirtk Commandment and the others. 67 on the right hand, and on the left, before and behind, but guarded it also in its own very structure, so that he who would destroy the law of the Sabbath must perforce destroy far more than it, before he has fin- ished his terrible task. There is this connection, again, between the Fourth and the other Commandments — that it provides the opportunity and the time for learning the duties pre- scribed in the other nine. If the Commandments were recorded for us in no published book, and if there were no formally set apart and generally recognised time for their exposition, it is evident that the likelihood of their general observance would be greatly dimin- ished. But just here comes in one evidence of the perfection of God's great code, that it provides within itself the means of its own enforcement and perpetua- tion. One of its ten precepts provides for the setting apart of a weekly day for the exposition of that re- vealed will of God of which it is so essential a part, for our being reminded of our duty to that God, and for our renewing of the vows of our allegiance to Him. It is not too much to say, therefore, that the observ- ance of the Fourth Commandment is connected in the closest manner with the observance of the other nine, and that every attempt to weaken its force, or undermine its foundations, militates not only against it, but against the entire body of laws of which it is an integral part. The fact is, the more we examine the arrangement of the Decalogue, and the internal arrangement of this Commandment, the more traces of Divinity do we dis- cover in both. Paley in his " Natural Theology " drew a famous argument from a watch. "In crossing a heath," he says, " suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch hap- pened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer that for anything I knew the watch might 6S Our Rest-Day. always have been there. For when we come to in- spect the watch, we perceive that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose — e.g., that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day ; that if the several parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use which is now served by it This mechanism being observed, the inference, I think, is inevitable — that the watch must have had a maker." A similar teleological argument might be drawn from the Deca- logue — the great moral time-keeper of the world. Its nature proclaims a Divine authorship. Its inner struc- ture speaks of the workmanship of a Divine hand. The delicate adjustment of part to part, of law to law, as of wheel to wheel, and of tooth to tooth in the machinery of the watch, unmistakeably reveals that it had a Maker, that it has a purpose, that that Maker must have been God, and that that purpose must be a purpose of good ; while, if we select any single law, such as this which we are specially considering, and subject it to minute examination, as the microscopist examines a single anther or ovule of a flower, we dis- cover in itself proof the most convincing that "the hand that made it was Divine." The Heidelberg Cate- chism makes a division of Theology which has always seemed to us most suggestive. It arranges all revealed truth under three heads — ^viz., our Ruin, our Redemp- tion, and our Gratitude, and under this third head it places the Ten Commandments. Whether the division be in all respects a good one or not, this last allocation is at all events very beautiful. If we love God, grati- tude for all His benefits will lead us to keep His Com- The Heidelberg Catechism, 69 manclments, and the more we examine them, or any one of them, the more reason shall we see to stir up our souls, and all that is within us to adore and admire the wisdom which glows in every line of His wond- rous code. CHAPTER VII. CHRIST AND THE SABBATH. '%. "E now come to a most important branch of onr inquiry. All parties to this discussion are agreed that the authority of the New Testa- ment on the subject of the Sabbath, as on other sub- jects, is indubitable. To the New Testament, then, let us go. Let us take up the various passages in it which speak of the Sabbath, and endeavour calmly to examine them and ascertain their meaning. An im- mense amount of misconception is afloat regarding the real teaching of the New Testament on the subject. We see this in our popular literature, especially in our serials. Texts are quoted (or misquoted), evidently without the smallest glimmer of their meaning being discerned.* Then readers take for granted that they are correctly quoted and correctly explained. The mischief thus spreads, and the blind being led by the blind, the proverbial result is inevitable. It will be well, therefore, to devote a chapter to enabling the reader to see for himself the real teaching of the New Testament on this subject. The word " Sabbath " occurs in the authorised ver- * The ignorance of the Bible displayed by many of the writers in our leading serials and by some even of our foremost authors is deplorable. Take the following examples, gathered almost at random : — "'I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed,' as says the Prodigal in the Parable ! " — " ' Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and to God the things which are God's,' as says Paul ! " " English authors cannot prosper till American publishers learn to respect the "seventh " commandment ! " The Greek Words for Sabbath. 71 sion of the New Testament sixty times. Three Greek words are represented by this one English term. In thirty-nine passages the word rendered Sabbath is SdjS^Saroi'. St. John uses this word only. In twenty passages the word is ^d^jSara, and in one instance the word in the original is a compound which requires several English words to represent it — Upoad^paTov— " the day before the Sabbath." Practically, however, we may take it for our purpose that in all the sixty places the word with which we have to deal is the same, the difference between ad^^arov and ad^lSara being merel}^ the difference between the pure Hebrew and the Aramaic, a difference which, for the object we have in view, is immaterial ; while in the case of the compound word UpoadjSiSaTOP we have simply the same term with a prefix. The Revised Version makes no change in the translation in any case save the follow- ing : — in Luke vi. 1, for, " It came to pass on the second Sabbath after the first," it reads " It came to pass on a Sabbath," inserting, however, this footnote at the place — " Many ancient authorities insert ' second — first.' " At Acts xvii. 2, we have a similar footnote, giving the word " weeks " instead of " Sabbath days " as an alter- native reading in the passage — " Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and for three Sabbath days reasoned with them from the Scriptures." The Re- vised Version adds the word " Sabbath " in one instance where it does not occur in the Authorised Version. We refer to Heb. iv. 9, which it renders — " There re- maineth, therefore, a Sabbath rest for the people of God." It will be seen that the difference between the two versions in regard to the word are immaterial, so far as our subject is concerned. Speaking broadly, it may be said that the two are in accord on the matter, and we may take it therefore on the conjoint authority of both translators and revisers that the original Greek is faithfully and fairly represented in our Authorised 72 0^tr Rest- Day, Version in all the passages which speak of the Day of Rest. Taking up the various places in their order, we come first of all to that memorable Sabbath walk of Jesus and His disciples — IN THE CORNFIELDS. Of this, three accounts are given us, one by Mat. (xii. 1), one by Mark (ii. 23), and the third by Luke (vi. 1). The day was the Jewish Sabbath. The dis- ciples were hungry. The funds at the disposal of the little company were but scanty, and provisions had run short. Their route, as they walked with the Master, led them along a path which ran through fields covered with ripe, or fast-ripening, corn. They took some of it, and, rubbing out the grain in their hcinds, ate of it. In this they were perfectly justified by Old Testament law, leaving all other justifications for the moment out of account, for in Deut. xxiii. 25 it is expressly said : — " When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbours, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thy hand." But the rabbins said, " No ; this might lawfully be done on a week-day, but not on the Sabbath. It amounts to ' reaping, thresh- ing, and grinding ; ' the plucking being equivalent to reaping, the rubbing to threshing and grinding, and is therefore entirely unlawful." The Jews accordingly found fault with the conduct of the disciples. Our Lord defended it, and as His teaching on the occasion gives us very clearly and explicitly His mind on the subject of the Sabbath, it will be well for us to notice it carefully. (1.) He justifies their conduct on the ground of necessity. They were hungry and needed food and had a right to take the food which the law and custom of the land made ready to their hand. In support of In the Cornfields. 73 this view of the case, He cites the case of David — a most apposite one in the circumstances. On one occa- sion, when hungry and unable to obtain food, he entered the house of God and " did eat the shew-bread which was not lawful for him to eat" (in ordinary circumstances), and the case of the priests who " on the Sabbath days profane the Sabbath (by the necessary work of the sanctuary) and are blameless." (2.) He justifies the disciples on the ground of mercy. In effect. He says to the Pharisees : " Your ways are not like mine or like my Father's. He does not desire His creatures to suffer even in supposed deference to His law. He will have ' mercy and not sacrifice.' " (3.) He justifies them on the ground of the Sabbath laiu itself The disciples are His ministers. In His service they have a right to sustenance on the Sabbath as on other days, just as the priests had in olden time. (4.) He justifies them on the ground of His oiun authority over the Sabbath. He is " Lord of the Sab- bath." It is His prerogative, therefore, to interpret it authoritatively, to say what its proper observance involves and what it does not. The Giver of the Sab- bath law can best interpret the Sabbath law. Even if no precedent had sustained the conduct of His dis- ciples. His word alone was sufficient to vindicate them in what they had done. (5.) He does more than all this — Re shoius that not only had the disciples not acted contrary to the law, hut the Pharisees had. The disciples had not broken the law of the Sabbath, but the Pharisees had broken the law of charity. Referring to Hosea vi. 6, He tells them, in stinging words, which must surely have made the ears of every one that heard them to tingle, that they had condemned the guiltless, and had proved that, like their forefathers, they did not understand even the first principles of the oracles of God. And so the tables are turned. 74 Our Rest-Day, But it is as important to notice in the account of this incident what Christ did not say, as what He did. Much misapprehension will be prevented by carefully noting : — (1.) He did not say in defence of His disciples — "Trouble them not. The Sabbath is abolished." It would seem as if some people were under the impres- sion that that is what He said. They require to read the story over again. (2.) Nor did He say — " It is not worth while finding fault with them. The Sabbath is ahout to he aholishedy Some people, again, talk and write as if this were either stated or implied in our Lord's words, and of course fall into gross error in consequence. The reader will look in vain for any such statement or implication in the entire passage. (3.) Nor did he say — " The Sabbath law is now re- laxed. Once, such things as the disciples have been doing would have been unlawful ; but those days are past. The Sabbath is not now what it was." You may look long and narrowly into the narrative with- out finding any thing of this kind. Yet some people seem to imagine that there was something like this said on the occasion. At least, one cannot well account for the mode in which they talk and act on any other supposition. Moreover, by the fairest inference it can be shown that our Lord's language implied the exact opposite of each of these statements which He did not make. For (1.) Certainly He implied that the Sabbath was still in existence. He speaks of it as an extant institution, and merely interprets its own old laws. (2.) He implies that it is to continue. Else why does He go to the trouble of putting it on a proper basis ? (3.) He implies that the true Sabbath law, as inter- preted by Himself, was still to be binding. The ''Lord of the Sabbath^ 75 (4.) Moreover, He shows that the disciples have not broken the law at all — that they need no lowering of its standard to allow them to escape — that they have really complied with its requirements. It has been argued by some that Christ here draws a distinction between the law of Sabbath observance and the law of mercy, and that He argues that if these two clash, the former, as being a mere ceremonial regulation, must give way. This argument, however, proceeds upon an entire misunderstanding of the passage. Our Saviour is not excusing a breach of Sabbath law. There had been no breach of Sabbath law. On the contrary, His contention is that the dis- ciples had broken no law, but that the Pharisees, their accusers, had. But no part of the incident has been more misunder- stood and misrepresented than the concluding words : "For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath." The meaning of this statement has been represented by opponents of Sabbath observance to be that Christ has power to release men from the necessity of ob- serving the Sabbath. There cannot be the smallest doubt, however, that that is not the intention of the words at all. First of all, it is to be noted that the conjunction k6,l (" even " or " also "), in Mat. xii. 8, is now regarded by all good critics as not properly belonging to the text. The omission of the one little word makes a great difference in the meaning. Cal- vin, for example, arguing from the presence of the con- junction, places the Sabbath in the same category as the shew-bread and the sacrifices previously mentioned — things merely ceremonial and destined to be done away. But that classification falls to the ground with the disappearance of the k6.l. It has only the autho- rity of some Cursives, and is omitted by the great MSS. which are recog-nised as really authoritative. Hence the Revised Version correctly reads : " For the ']6 Our Rest- Day, Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath ; " and with the disappearance of the conjunction, the argument built on it disappears likewise. But, if this " also " has had a force ascribed to it to which it is not entitled, the other little word ydp (" for ") has, on the contrary, too often not had its meaning: recoOTised at all. Yet it helps us in no small degree to the true significance and intention of the statement we are considering. What is the force of the word ? It is plainly an illative, and gives the reason for the preceding statement — the ground for the assertion of the innocence of the dis- ciples. It is as if Christ had said : " You have been condemning these men unjustly. They are entirely innocent. It is enough that I say so, for I am the Lord of the Sabbath, and if I am satisfied, that is enouo^h." This is the evident exeo^esis of the words. There is yet a third word in the passage which has been strangely overlooked — the word 'avatTiovs (" inno- cent ") — the proper understanding of which completely bears out our position. Christ is here vindicating guiltless persons, not excusing transgressors. He tells their accusers so. There is no need of relaxing the law to palliate their offence. They have committed no offence. They are innocent. The entire passage, therefore, clearly teaches that the Sabbath institution was expressly recognised by Christ — that He had no intention either of abolishing it or of relaxing: its bindino: force — but, at the same time, that it was to be observed, not in such a narrow spirit as the glosses of human casuistry thought fit to impose upon it, but with a full, free, and joyous recog- nition of the great love of our heavenly Father, whose ordinance it is, and with an equal recognition of the just claims and needs of man, for whose good, and not for whose oppression, it was given. We still require to bear all this carefully in view, even in this last quarter of our boastful nineteenth century. The Man with the Withered Hand. yy In the same chapter of Matthew (xii. 9), we find another instructive incident bearing on our subject — the healing of the man with THE WITHERED HAND. His story is given with more or less of circumstan- tiality by the same three Evangelists who tell us of the walk in the corn-fields — Matthew (xii. 9), Mark (iii. 1), and Luke (vi. 6). The incident took place in a synagogue. A man was there whose right hand had been disabled by paralysis. Christ's enemies, who were incessantly dogging His steps, collecting materials for charges of impiety against Him, were on the watch to see whether His compassion for the poor fellow would not be restrained by the fact that it was the Sabbath day. So miserably small and mean were their religious ideas ! At length they put the question pointedly to Him : "Is it lawful to heal on the Sab- bath days ? " The Saviour's answer is threefold. He first replies by a strong piece of a fortiori analogical reasoning, "What man of you shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath day," etc. Secondly, He lays down a great principle, " It is lawful to do well on the Sabbath day." Thirdly, He heals the man. This striking little incident has a fine interpretative bearing on the law of the Sabbath. It is to be noticed that no hint is given here, any more than in the case previously considered, of any abolition of it, or any intended abolition. But a withering rebuke is boldly administered to the narrow souls who would refuse to do for a fellow-man what they would not hesitate to do for a sheep, and through them a withering rebuke to all small men, in all ages, who imagine that they honom- God by inflicting on, or neglecting to remove from, His creatures, suffering, at any time, Sabbath yS Our Rest- Day. day or week day. The principle laid down in that terse statement, " It is lawful to do well on the Sab- bath day," covers a very wide extent of ground. I£ the incident of the corn-field refers specially to works of necessity, this case of the withered hand particularly legalises works of mercy, and makes it not only allow- able, but imperative, to turn the sacred hours of the Holy Day to the best account by caring on it for all God's creatures that are in need, but specially for maaa, our own brother, and God's chief est work. IN THE CAPERNAUM SYNAGOGUE, a somewhat similar incident took place, recorded by Mark (i. 21), and Luke (iv. 31). Jesus was at Caper- naum, and, according to custom. He went to the syna- gogue on a certain Sabbath. At the proper part of the service for so doing. He addressed to the congrega- tion a discourse which astonished them. Among them that day there happened to be one of those unfortu- nate creatures who seem to have been so numerous in Palestine in the days of the Incarnation — a demoniac. Jesus, according to His usual practice, healed him. There seems to have been no remark made on this occasion as to the cure having been wrought on the Sabbath. At all events, none is recorded. The teach- ing of the incident goes in the same direction as that which we have just been considering — showing the propriety of doing good on the Sabbath. But this additional point comes out in it — the Master's constant practice of attending the place of worship of the locality where He happened to be on the Sabbath, and preaching in it when He had opportunity. IN THE NAZARETH SYNAGOGUE. This latter point comes out again in the account of Healing the Sick on the Sabbath. 79 the first occasion on which we have any mention of His addressing a synagogue congregation. It was at Nazareth — the home of His childhood — and Luke tells us (iv. 16), that, " as His custom was," He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath. The marvellous text which He chose on that occasion — " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me," etc. — and the no less marvellous sermon which He preached from it, will be fresh in the recollection of our readers. Luke (xiii. 10) gives us a precious little incident which occurred also in a synagogue — where, we are not told. It was the Sabbath day again, and again in the conoreo-ation which had assembled there was a hopeless invalid. This time it was a woman, who was afflicted with a painful disease of eighteen years' standing. By a word Jesus looses her from her in- firmity. This provokes the ruler of the synagogue. Addressing the people, but really talking at Jesus as much as to them, he says : — " There are six days in which men ought to work, and not on the Sabbath day." This unhappy remark, so characteristically Judaic, drew forth from the Master one of those burn- ing rebukes with which more than once He scathed into nothingTiess the haughty self-sufficiency of His adversaries. " Thou hypocrite," He indignantly cries, " doth not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall and lead him away to watering ? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo ! these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day ? " A fresh vindication is thus given of the right and the practice of doing whatever good comes to our hand on the Holy Day. No wonder the Evangelist concludes his story of this encounter with the statement — " When He had said these things, all His adversaries were ashamed." Well they might be ! 8o Our Rest- Day. AT A PHARISEE S HOUSE. On another occasion Jesns " went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread " (Luke xiv. 1). In the midst of His fatio'uins^ work He needed refresh- ment, and, having no home of His own to which to go. He accepted the invitation of this friend. A number of other j)ersons were also invited to share the repast. A man afflicted with a dropsical complaint made his appearance during the meal, and Christ, knowing the thoughts which would be flitting through the brains of His host and fellow-guests, boldly propounded the question, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day ?" There was no answer. They had been so often routed on this battle-ground that probably they had no desire for another defeat. Christ first, then, healed the suf- ferer, and then vindicated His conduct by the same argument with which He had already discomfited Jewish cavillers more than once : " Which of you shall have an ass, or an ox, fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day ? " To this again, there was no answer. What answer could there be ? Some people have said that the action of the Master on this occasion amounted to the attending of a dinner party on the Sabbath. It may seem hardly worth while to spend time over such a point. All that is said, however, in the passage is, " He went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread." What meal it was is not specified. Nor are the viands mentioned. But, oTantino^ that it was somethinsj cor- responding to our dinner, and that others were present as well as Jesus, this is something very far from con- stituting the occasion a dinner party in our modern sense of the term. If a clergyman, preaching at a dis- tance from home, receives an invitation from one of his hearers to partake of dinner at his house after service. ^^ Sabbath Feasts^ 8i and if the host ask some of his fellow-worshippers to come along with the stranger, we have what appears to be a parallel case to that recorded by Luke. That, however, is something very different from what is implied when it is asserted that Jesus attended dinner parties on the Sabbath. It is to be feared that the wish to give the Master's conduct this appearance is father to the thought. Both wish and thought, how- ever, these cavillers must cherish on their own author- ity. They have no right to read them into a narrative where they are not. But, indeed, one would rejoice at any number of Sabbath dinner-parties like that at this Pharisee's table. At it the guests got that incompar- able teaching about humility — about inviting the j)oor to our feasts — and the parable of the Great Supper. We shall gladly welcome all the Sabbath feasts that can be provided where the host sliall engage himself to provide such a teacher, and such teaching for his guests. Till that is done, people had better not call by the same name things which differ from each other, toto codo, like this " eating of bread " and a nineteenth century dinner party. AT BETHESDA. Another case of Sabbath healing was that where the miracle was wrought at the pool of Bethesda (John v. 1). On this occasion the objection made by the Jews, as recorded by the Evangelist, was not so much to the cure which was wrouoiit as to the man's carryinoc liis bed on the sacred day. So miserably dwarfed and contracted had their souls become ! This was " a bearing of burdens," and could not be tolerated on the Sabbath. These people would have allowed the man to bear the burden of his hopeless infirmity. Sabbath and week-day, for his life long. But to bear his mat- bed — now that he could walk erect and strong like F 82 Ou7^ Rest- Day, themselves — in proof of the great cure which infinite mercy had wrought on him, was more than their pious zeal could tolerate ! Let us not marvel at them over- much. There are narrow-minded souls among our- selves not so greatly superior to these precisely zealous purists. We are told that they sought to take Christ's life because of His conduct. Their zeal for law and order, for religion and godliness, did not restrain them from conspiring to break the Sixth Commandment, in their anxiety for the observance of the Fourth accord- ing to their strictly silly notions. The answer of the Lord to their small, miserably small, assaults, is as lofty as their views were petty and contemptible. What dignity breathes in His words — "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work ! " In John vii. 23, we have another defence from the lips of Christ of His practice of healing disease on the Sabbath. (How strange it seems to us that He should need to defend such a practice even once !) Using His favourite proof from analogy again. He argues that, although no " servile work " was permitted by the Mosaic law on the Sabbath, yet circumcision was permitted and practised on that day, much more should the deliverance of a man from disease be counted right. " Moses," He says, " gave you circumcision, and ye on the Sabbath day circumcise a man. If a man on the Sabbath day receive circumcision, that the law of Moses should not be broken, are ye angry at me be- cause I have made a man every whit whole on the Sabbath day ? Judge not according to the appear- ance, but judge righteous judgment." The same evangelist gives us in chapter ix. an account of the cure by the Master of a blind man. From verse 14 we learn that this miracle also was wrought on the Sabbath. The Flight on the Sabbath Day, 83 MATTHEW XXIV. 20. In Matthew xxiv. 20 we have a text which has an important bearing on our subject. Our Lord is dis- coursing on the impending destruction of Jerusalem, and on the horrors by which it is to be accompanied. In the course of His remarks He says : " Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sabbath day." Now, one point is clear from these words, a point to which we have already adverted — the Sabbath was not intended to come to an end with the death of Christ. The destruction of Jerusalem was not to take place, and did not take place, for many years after the Orucifixion. Yet, in speaking of the overthrow of the Holy City, Christ talks of the Sabbath in such a way as to show that it was still to be in existence at the time, and by implication sanctions its observance. It is as if He said : " Jerusalem is about to be destroyed. But the Sabbath will not be destroyed. It will exist then as it exists now." No hint about its abolition. On the contrary, a distinct intimation that though Jerusalem and the Temple might fall, the Day of Kest should not be overthrown. Another little bit of information may be gleaned from the words before us. It is this — the Christian Sabbath is, mutatis mutandis, but a continuation of the Jewish. Notice to whom Christ is speaking on this occasion. Not to the Jewish people at large, but (verse 3) to " the disciples." It was the Twelve whom He was addressing. They " came unto Him privily," asking for information as to the troubles He had been speaking of, and it was on them that He urged the propriety of this prayer regarding the time of their flight. Now, the Lord knew perfectly well all about the after history of these disciples. He knew that forty years subsequently they would be in the new dispensation — the dispensation of the Spirit. He knew 84 Our Rest- Day, that they would be observing, with the sanction of His own example, not the seventh, but the first day of the week as the Day of Rest ; yet, fully anticipating these changes, and knowing all about them, there is one point as to which He foresees no change and appoints none — the Sabbath is still to be observed and Sabbath law is still to have force. It is not another institution that is then to be set up, of a kindred but different character. It is just the same old Sabbath that had been observed from the time of Creation — that had been prescribed in the Fourth Commandment — with such changes impressed upon it as altered circum- stances required, but, withal, the later Sabbath not differing from the earlier, any more than the sun as it shines on the summer morning, in the beautiful grey dawn that breaks so sweetly over land and sea, differs from the same sun as it shines at summer noontide in its magnificent glow. There are differences in the two shinings, but there are not two suns. And there are differences between the Jewish Sabbath and the Chris- tian, but there are not two Sabbaths. Again, the name " Sabbath " is here sanctioned as applicable to the Christian Day of Rest. There is something in a name, Shakespeare's authority not- withstanding. Often, men excuse and gloss over their sins by giving them fine names. Duelling becomes "an affair of honour." A breach of the Seventh Commandment is spoken of as " an affair of gallan- try " — a lie as " an economy of truth " — a bastard as " a love-child " — and here in Ireland, we had, not long ago, the " Invincibles," calling murder only the " removing " of a man, and, no doubt, concealing, by the use of that term, the heinousness of their crime to a large extent even from themselves ; while more recently a wholesale system of robbery and fraud was dignified by the high-sounding title " the Plan of Cam- paign." Men who would shudder at the commission ** Sabbath " or '* Sunday "f 85 of gross sins sometimes come to think little of them when their real hideousness is disguised beneath a fine name. This thought has an important bearing on our subject. If the Day of Rest is only " Sunday," and has no right to the older name, then the associations which for millenniums clustered round the Sabbath are gone. It loses its Biblical aspect. Its venerable age sinks out of sight. All the memorable history which has ennobled it fades away, and, worst of all, the authority by which it was first enacted, and in accordance with which it was observed in after time, has a tendency to be forgotten — the sacred sanctions of the day are obscured, and, insensibly perhaps, but none the less surely and balef ully, we come to think of the day, not as a Divine institution at all, but as only a man-made holiday ; not as a day sacred to God, but as one on which we have full liberty to do as we list within certain conventional limits. I would not be a stickler for names. As excellent people talk of " Sun- day " as of " Sabbath," and it can be, and is, as well observed under the one appellation as the other. But let it be well noted that we have a right to call the day " the Sabbath." In doing so we follow the best example, that of Christ. That name is, besides, in itself a beautiful and suggestive name, for Sabbath is rest, and Sabbath-day, Rest-day. There is peace in its very sound. And the name has, like many another name, a great principle lying at the back of it, the principle that the day is no new institution, but one only a little younger than the world itself, round which gather the holy memories of thousands of years and the history of earth's happiest peoples and most pro- sperous epochs. That the interpretation which applies this text to the Christian Sabbath is the correct one, there can be, I think, no manner of doubt. That which applies it to the Jewish Sabbath, yields, in my judgment, any- S6 Our Rest- Day, thing but a good meaning. It makes Christ speak of His disciples as being still Jews forty years after His death. THE DEATH OF CHRIST. Several mentions of the Sabbath occur in connection with the death of our Lord. Of the Friday, on which the Crucifixion took place, it is said, " It was the Pre- paration and the Sabbath drew on " (Luke xxiii. 54). More explicitly Mark says — (xv. 42) " It was the Pre- paration, that is the day before the Sabbath," and John says — (xix. 31) " The Jews, therefore, because it was the Preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross upon the Sabbath day, for that Sabbath day was an high day, besought Pilate that their legs might be broken." On the importance of Christians, as well as Jews, making some sort of " preparation " for the Sabbath on the day before, we have already observed, and shall have occasion to speak again. Again, of the two Maries we read (Mat. xxviii. 1), " In the end of the Sabbath " (or as the Revised Version reads — " Late on the Sabbath day "), " as it began to dawn towards the first day of the week," they came to the sepulchre. Mark's words are (xvi. 1), " When the Sabbath was past." Luke's account is (xxiv. 1), " Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morn- ing, they came unto the sepulchre," and John says — " The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre." Our Saturday, their Sabbath, was over, and our Sabbath, their first day of the week, was come — the day which was henceforth to be the Christian's most blessed day, reminding him not only of the old creation but of the new — not only of the first birth of all things, but of the being born again — not only of the rising of a world into being, but of the rising again of the world's Our Lord and the Sabbath, ^'j Maker and Redeemer from the grave on the world's behalf. OUR LORDS TREATMENT OF THE SABBATH. Pausing here at the close of our consideration of the references in the Gospels to the Sabbath, let us try to sum up their teaching as to our Master's views on the subject. (1.) It is evident from the passages to which we have referred that He neither abolished the Sabbath nor relaxed its sanctions. (2.) He observed the Sabbath Himself, and not only so, but, projecting His thoughts into the future. He foresaw and sanctioned its observance after He should be gone. (3.) He cleared it from the accretions of rabbinical tradition and gloss, which had gathered round it in the course of ages. But in this process, instead of doing anything to weaken its authority, or interfere with its binding force. He only brought out its claims and its beauty into brighter lustre.* Sometimes there is found buried in one of our Irish bogs a golden orna- ment which, centuries ago, has fastened the mantle of some Celtic chieftain. Through the damps and ne- * " One might as well say that one who was scraping barnacles from the bottom of a ship was destroying it, as to say that * Christ was a Sabbath-breaker. ' Removing barnacles is a sign that a vessel is to be sent out anew." — The iSabbath foi' Man, by Rev. Dr. Crafts. " There does not seem to be one instance in which Jesus ever set aside an original Mosaic rite or institute. It was the addi- tions made by the Pharisees that He pushed away without rever- ence, and even with repugnance. He went behind the tradition of the elders to the law itself ; nay, He accepted the commands of Moses because they coincided with the Divine will, and con- demned only the ' traditions that made the commandments of God of none effect.' " — Life of Jesus the Christ, by Henry Ward Beecher. SS Our Rest-Day. gleets of ages it has become green and disfigured, so as almost completely to have lost, not only the beauty of workmanship which once adorned it, but even the very appearance of gold. When it comes into the hands of one who recognises its preciousness, and when he carefully cleanses away the accretions which have gathered round it, does this action of his proceed from a disregard of his " find " and from a desire to destroy it ? On the contrary, is not his cleansing of the orna- ment reverent and thorough in proportion to the value which he sets upon it, and to the strength of his wish that it may exhibit again its pristine beauty ? So with our Lord's treatment of the Sabbath. He found it buried amid a mass of traditional observances which had thrown its meaning and spirit almost altogether into obscurity. Recognising its beauty and value, He took it up lovingly, and with firm but kindly hand He removed the foreign incrustations which had gathered round it, that it might shine again in its own native lustre for the joy and blessing of a needy world. (4.) He taught that it was to be a day (a) of wor- ship ; (6) of beneficence ; (c) not of narrow, Pharisaic restrictions, but of holy freedom — freedom, however, always subordinate to, and within the limits of, law. (5.) He gave it new and additional meaning and beauty by making it His Resurrection Day. In following the Master in all this, lies, we believe the true secret of right Sabbath-keeping. CHAPTER VIII. TEE APOSTLES AND THE SABBATH. tN this chapter we propose examining the various references to the Sabbath which occur in the Apostolic period. When we have done so, we shall have placed before the reader a complete view of the statements of the New Testament reo^nrdino^ it. We begin with the Acts of the Apostles. In this book there are several references to the Day of Rest. In chap. i. we have an allusion to the Sabbath Day's journey — a distance of 2000 cubits, or between seven and eight furlongs, which tradition had long fixed as the limit of a Sabbath walk. The other passages in the book bearing on our subject refer mainly to the synagogue worship on that day, and to the practice which the Apostles made of utilising this synagogue worship for the purpose of reasoning with the Jews on the claims of Christianity (xiii. 14 ; xvii. 2 ; xiii. 27 ; xiii. 42 ; xiii. 44 ; xv. 21 ; xviii. 4). We find from this book of Acts, as well as from other parts of the New Testament, that the Apostles observed the Chris- tian Sabbath on the First Day (xx. 7 ; 2 Cor. xvi. 2), meeting on it for worship, for the observance of the Lord's Supper, and for offering contributions to God's cause. But, becoming to the Jews as Jews, if by any means they might gain some of them, they went at times to the synagogues on the old seventh day, ac- cepting the opportunities of exhortation which were afforded them at it, for the purpose of advancing the claims and upholding the cause of Christ. Further, 90 Oui^ Rest-Day, we find that the early Jewish converts, in some cases^ observed both days, and that the Apostles allowed this practice, as they allowed the continuance of circumci- sion and in some cases actually themselves administered that rite. But the Christian Sabbath was henceforth to be kept on the First Day, that Lord's Day on which John was " in the Spirit " in his sea-girt prison. So the observance of the Seventh Day gradually faded into desuetude, leaving the First in almost undisputed possession of the rights of the Day of Rest, that First i Day which is destined to retain all its strength and beauty until the Sabbaths of earth melt and merge into the eternal Sabbath of Heaven. IN THE EPISTLES. The word Sabbath ((7d/3/3ara) occurs but once in the Epistles. As the passage is of some importance in this discussion and is often misunderstood and misin- terpreted, we must bestow some attention upon it. It is Coloss. ii. 16, 17 — "Let no man therefore judge you in meat or drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath days, which are a shadow of things to come ; but the body is of Christ." Now, serious error often arises from the mistake of forgetting the occasion and circumstances which have given rise to the writing of any letter or treatise. Such circumstances are always presupposed by an author to be in the minds of his readers, and they give their own tinge of meaning to his language. Unless, therefore, we keep them steadily in mind we can scarcely fail to make mistakes. It is necessary for us, therefore, to know the object and purpose of this Epistle to the Colossians. Happily these are perfectly clear. It was intended to counteract Judaising teaching and practices, mixed up with a certain Oriental theosophy, which had begun to make their appearance in the Coloss. ii. 1 6, 17. 91 church at Colosse. For this purpose, St. Paul en- deavours to show his readers their standing in Christ, in whom Jewish law has found its fulfilment, and Jewish type its anti-type. Let no man, therefore, says he, beguile you in respect to such things. He enumer- ates a number of Jewish observances, such as " meat " (ceremonially clean or unclean), " drink " (the Essenes drank water only and forbade all other drinks), " holy- days " (literally " feasts " — such as the Feast of Taber- nacles, the Passover, etc.), " new moons " (Jewish monthly festivals) or " Sabbath days " {i.e., Jewish Sabbath days), and he warns his readers against all who would teach them that the observance of these was obligatory or possessed any merit or special sacredness. The reader has only to turn to Levit. xxiii. 24, 32, 39, and to Num. xxix. passim, to see for himself that the Jews styled many of their festivals Sabbaths. It will be well, while looking at this pas- sage, to take into our view two others of a kindred nature, viz., Rom. xiv. 5, 6, and Galat. iv. 11. The former reads thus — "One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day regardeth it unto the Lord, and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it." The latter is as follows — "Ye observe days and months and times and years ; I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain." Now all the passages which we have cited are to be taken, if we would have an intelligent appre- hension of their meaning and application, in full re- membrance of the matters in dispute at the time. Paul could not blame his readers for observing all days, for he observed the First Day himself, and he directs its observance by others. But he could, and he felt he ought to, blame them, not so much for observing Jewish feast days, as for attaching to the observance of them 92 Our Rest Day, a special significance and sacredness, instead of rejoic- ing in their new-found Christian liberty, and for think- ing hardly of those who did not see their way to act as they did in respect to them. That this is his mean- ing, the whole scope and connection of all these pas- sages clearly show. There was no question then as to the observance of the First Day Sabbath. Jewish and Gentile Christians alike kept it. * We have already mentioned that there is one other passage in the Epistles which, according to the Kevised Version, introduces the word Sabbath, and, as we be- lieve, introduces it rightly and properly. This is Heb. iv. 9 — "There remaineth, therefore, a (Sabbath, Re- vised Version) rest to the people of God." The idea here is a very beautiful and suggestive one. There are three words used in the New Testament which signify the rest which we may have now, even here on earth. First there is /cardTrauo-ts, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew " Noah," and not inaptly represented by the thought of his rest at Ararat, when, after its tossings on the strange diluvian sea, his ark rested on the mountains. This is the word employed in the other parts of this chapter in Hebrews, and in the jDre- ceding one — "Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into His (Christ's) «:aTd7rai;o-ts, * Haldane quotes from Stopford on this passage in Colossians as follows : — " The word ' Sabbaths' here is plural without the article. It is sometimes used in the plural to signify the weekly Sabbath — but nmer without the article. Whenever given by the Evangelists as contained in any saying of our Lord's, it is given in the singular, except where it meant Sabbaths in general ; because our Lord intended to displace, by fulfilling, the plural Sabbaths attending the feasts, along with the feasts themselves, but to 'preserve the single weekly Sabbath. In John's gospel, written after the cessation of the Jewish polity and laws, the word is never used but in the ' singular, for like reason. Our Lord corrected only those errors that had disfigured the pure maxims of universal obligation ; we find no corrections made by Him of temporary or national ordinances. " any of you should seem to come short of it," and so on. Then there is the similar compound avd-rraixns, which is the word found in that classic passage, Mat. xi. 28, 29 — " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you avdxavats," i.e. rest from weariness. Last of all, there is aveo-ts, relaxation, as in 2 Thess. i. 7 — " And to you who are troubled, rest with us." But when the writer of the Epistle to the He- brews would speak of the final rest of the saint, he seeks out a new word altogether, a word nowhere else employed in the Bible — the word o-a^S/SarKr/ios, — a Sab- bath rest — a rest, like God's at the beo-innino- from all work. It is when we combine the exquisite idea wrapped up in this word with the ideas of the other three which we have mentioned, the ideas of rest from weariness, rest from sorrow, and rest from sin, with this which speaks of rest in the completion of God's new creation, as the first aa^jSaTKXfios spoke of rest in the completion of His old creation, that we gain the com- plete, beautiful conception of what the beatific rest, the Sabbath of eternity, is to be. Each earthly Sab- bath ought to be an image of it and be pervaded by its spirit, as each tiny rock-pool which you discover among the fucus-clad cliffs, when the tide has ebbed, is on a small scale an image of the great ocean which heaves and frets close by — obeys the same laws, reflects the same summer sky, and is filled with the same crystal element. Each day of God that comes to us ouo'ht to be a little bit of Heaven broue^ht down to earth, filled with the same joy, governed by the same holy laws, reflecting the same Blessed Presence. But as the great ocean, stretching away from your feet to the horizon, far transcends in greatness, and mj'stery, and glory, and beauty, the tiny pool which you have just left, whose waves are ripples, whose brightness is flecked by the shadows of the cliffs, and whose inhabi- tants are cribbed and confined by the rocky walls that 94 Our Rest- Day, evermore shut them in, so in greatness, and glory, and beauty, in brightness, and freedom and blessedness. will the Sabbath of heaven far transcend the brightest Rest-Day of which here we have had experience. Summing up the teaching of the New Testament on our subject, it is clear that Christ and His Apostles recognised the Sabbath, observed the Sabbath, and ex- plained the Sabbath. In keeping it, therefore, we walk in holy society, the society of " the glorious com- pany of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets," but, holiest and best of all, the society of the Master Himself. If we disregard it, we are not of their spirit. CHAPTER IX. TEE CHANGE OF DAY. fHERE is one point with regard to the Sabbath at which we must now look, and, as it is a point of great importance, we shall devote a chapter to its consideration. We refer to the change in the day of its observance. Originally, the seventh day of the week was kept sacred. Now we hallow the first. How and why has this change been made, by whose authority, and with what end in view ? Let us look at these points for a little. That there has been this change of day is evident, and the fact itself is surely significant, that, whereas the original institution mentioned the seventh day, now the first is universally, or all but universally, kept.* There must be some adequate reason to account for this change. Men do not change their views and their practices so completely without cause. Especially great bodies of men, whole churches, strongly and pro- verbially conservative in other matters, do not make * Shortly after the first edition of this book appeared, the writer happened to be in London. Conversing there one day with an eminent minister, the latter said he had just been read- ing '' Our Rest Day," and made some complimentary references to it. "But," he added, with a humorous twinkle in his eye, *' there is one great omission in your book." "What is that ? " *' Why, you make no mention whatever of the Seventh Day Baptists, and the great importance of the body you may gather from the fact that they have three whole congregations in Eng- land ! " They keep the Sabbath on the seventh day. g6 Our Rest- Day, radical alterations like this without sufficient reason. Here are two facts, both undeniable — the first, that originally the Sabbath was kept on the seventh day, the second, that it is now observed on the first all over the world, and our argument is that, even supposing that we conld not discover the precise reason for an alteration so great, the fact of the alteration having come about so universally itself argues the existence of a sufficient cause. The principle embodied in the famous words — quod seim'peT uhique et ah omnibus applies here. For an observance practised so univer- sally there must be reason, whether that reason be discoverable or not. If a river, after flowing in a cer- tain direction, suddenly changes its course, we may be very certain that the change can be accounted for in some way, either by natural agency or artificial, even although history is silent on the subject. Of the golden stream named the Sabbath, may we not say the same ? There is another thing equally evident, — the precise point of time at which this change of day began. Up to a particular date, no day but the seventh was ob- served as the Sabbath, since that date almost all Chris- tendom keeps the first. This sharp and clearly defined break synchronizes with the resurrection of Christ. Before the resurrection there was only a seventh day Sabbath. Since it there is a first. Let us see this for ourselves by examining the history of the matter. The resurrection itself took place on the first day of the week. There is no reason that we can see, flowing from the work of Christ, why it should have occurred on that day more than on any other. We can discover no purposes which would not have been quite as well served by a resurrection on the seventh day, or the fifth, or the third. Now if our Lord had risen on the seventh, it cannot be doubted that the fact of the occurrence of so significant and important an event The First Day, 97 on the Jewish Sabbath would have given an added sanctity to that day. But it was expressly arranged that that should not be the day of the resurrection. The sanctity which the day would thus have received was deliberately withheld from it and given to another. Surely there is great significance in this fact, especi- ally when taken in conjunction with the other, that beginning with that first day of the week, our Lord ceased to frequent the synagogue and Temple on the seventh day, as had been His custom, and His dis- ciples, following His example, did the same, and He and they met together on what we now call the Chris- tian Sabbath. That there might be no doubt in any mind as to the exact day on which the Lord rose, all four evangelists are careful to mention it with great particularity. Matthew says the event took place " as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week " (Matt, xxviii. 1). Mark says it was " very early in the morning, the first day of the week " (Mark xvi. 2). Luke's account is that it occurred " upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning" (Luke xxiv. 1), and John's — " the first day of the week, when it was yet dark " (John xx. 1). There is, and can be no ques- tion, therefore, as to this point, that the resurrection took place on the first day of the week, and there can be as little that from and after that date, this day had transferred to it the observances which had hitherto characterised the seventh. On that very first day of the week, on which the resurrection occurred, the eleven met together and Jesus met with them (Luke xxiv. 33). That day week they met again, and again Jesus met with them (John xx. 26). Immediately, it will be observed, the day seems to have become fixed as the day of holy convocation. When the forty days of our Lord's post-resurrection life were expired, and He was gone, the same arrangement continued. " They were G 98 Our Rest- Day. all with one accord in one place," met for their accus- tomed worship, when the Holy Spirit descended on the Day of Pentecost, and this Day of Pentecost occurred on the first day of the week (Acts ii. 1). At Troas, *' upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them " (Acts xx. 7). There, as at Jerusalem, they had come to regard this as the day for Christian worship and the observance of Christian ordinances. At Tyre it seems to have been the same, for when Paul landed there he " tarried there seven days," as he had done at Troas, — doubtless waiting to take advantage of the day of public assembly, in the one case as in the other. In Corinth the same custom prevailed. Paul writes to the Church.-there — " Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I •come " (1 Cor. xvi. 2). In the churches of Galatia it was the same (1 Cor. xvi. 1). So universal had the practice of keeping the first day become at a very early period, that John speaks of the day as " the Lord's Day " (Rev. i. 10). By the end of the first cen- tury, wherever Christianity had reached, the honours hitherto worn by the seventh day had by common consent been transferred to the first. When we travel outside the region of inspiration, testimonies to the same effect as those in Scripture meet us on every hand. Pliny the Younger, in his well-known letter to Trajan, speaks of this day when he says of the Christians of his time — " They were accustomed on a stated day to meet before daylight and to repeat among themselves a hymn to Christ as a god."* The language of Justin Martyr is more dis- tinct. He says in his first " Apology," — " On the day called Sunday there is a meeting in one place of all * a Tlin. a Sac, x., 97. The Practice of the Early Christians. 99 who reside either in the towns or in the country, and the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read. The reading having concluded, the president delivers a discourse, instructing the people, and exhorting them to imitate the good things which they had heard. Then we all stand up and engage in prayer, after which bread is brought in, with wine and water. The president offers up accord- ing to his ability prayers and thanks a second time, to which the people express their assent with a loud * Amen.' Then follows a general distribution and par- ticipation of the things for which thanks have been given, and a portion is conveyed to the absent by the deacons. The more affluent contribute of their sub- stance as each is inclined, and what is collected is entrusted to the president, who carefully relieves the orphans and widows, and those who from sickness or other causes are needy, and also those in prison, and the strangers who are residing with us, and in short all who have need of help. We all assemble to- gether in common on Sunday/'* Similar testimonies might be adduced from many other authorities, such as Melito, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, and Clem- ent of Alexandria. We content ourselves with but one more, that of Eusebius. His words are very plain and conclusive. He says — " All things whatever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have trans- ferred to the Lord's day, as more appropriately belong- ing to it, because it has a precedence, and is first in rank, and more honourable than the Jewish Sabbath. It is delivered to us that we should meet together on this day."t That the change of day was made, therefore, and made at the date of the Resurrection of Christ, is clear. From that first day till now, each Lord's Day has seen * Apol. I. t Comment, on Ps. xcii. lOo Ou7' Rest- Day. Christian people assemble in their congregations all over the world for the worship of God.* Now, as we have shown, it is very certain that this change has not come about without a cause. Can we arrive at the authority for it ? ^^ There is sufficient authority for this or any change that they chose to make in the example and teaching of the Apostles. They were the appointed legates of the Head of the Church, to bind or loose, to retain or remit as they chose. Before He left the world He gave them their commission, "Go ye therefore and teach all nations .... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Mat. xxviii. 19.) We do not know precisely when He intimated to them His will that the observance of the seventh day should cease and that of the first take its place. There is no record on the subject, any more than there is of other things which are yet most surely believed among us. We do not know when Paul "received of the Lord " that account of the institution and meaning of the Lord's Supper which he has left on record for us in the eleventh chapter of 1st Corinthians. We know he received it and that is sufficient for us. The time and place are unimportant. Similarly, we do not know when Christ told the eleven His will regarding this change of day. That He did intimate it is clear. They would never have acted as they did in a matter so important without a " Thus saith the Lord." Besides, they had His own example for the change. We know that on several occasions He conferred with them re- * That from the death of the Apostle John onward to the time of Constantine the first day of the week was kept as the Lord's Day wherever a Christian community was found is a fact quite beyond doubt. Dr. Hessey calls it " a point which no one so much as thought of disputing " {Bampton Lectures on Sunday). Mosheim says: "It was observed universally throughout ten Christian Churches, as appears from the united testimony of the most credible writers " {Church History, Book I, IV., 2). JlVij' zuas the Day Changed f loi garding the future arrangements of His Church, and, no doubt on some such occasion He settled this point among others. Before He was taken up " He through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the Apostles whom He had chosen, to whom also He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible 2~)roofs, being seen of them forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God " (Acts i. 2, 3). Paul could say to the Church at Thessalonica, " Ye know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus " (1 Thess. iv. 2). No doubt, as at Creation, the Lord, in addition to His own example in resting on the Sabbath also set it apart by a special blessing to be a day of re3t, so after the Resurrection He gave the same two sanctions to the change of day. The apostles were not the men Avithout proper authority to " break one of these least commandments and to teach men so." They Avere not men given to change. It was but slowly that the large ideas of the Gospel gained access to their minds. They were not eager for innovation. Nothing therefore can be more certain than that they had full authority from the Lord of the Sabbath for what they did in the matter of the Sabbath. They had that authority in the Lord's example. They had it also, we may be well assured, in His expressly revealed will, * There is no doubt, of course, that Paul repeatedly mot with the Jews on the seventh day and " reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, as his manner was." But he himself gives us the reason why he did so. It w^as not to sanction the keeping of the seventh day Sabbath. " Unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews " (1 Cor. ix. 20). He circumcised * " Nothing short of apostolic precedence can account for the universal religious observance (of the Lord's Day) in the churches ♦• of the second centurv. There ij nu dissenting voice." — JSchaff's Church Hhtory, II.. 201. ib2 Our Rest- Day, Timothy, and purified himself according to the manner of the Jews. He went to the synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath, as any modern Jewish missionary would be glad to do if he could. But he no more thereby sanc- tioned the keeping of the seventh day than when he preached at Areopagus he sanctioned idolatry. Christ had full authority to change the day. " The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath day " (Mat. xii. 8). He instituted it at first, for He was the Creator. " All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made " (John i. 3). From that time of the first Sabbath He was its Lord, to interpret its laws and change it as He chose. As its Lord He cleared it from the rabbinical accretions which had gathered round it when He came to earth, and as its Lord also, when He rose from the dead. He altered the day of its observance — being, need one say, fully within His right in so doing ? There was a reasonableness in the change. A "priori it was a change which might have been expected. Dr. Wardlaw has well put this view of the matter thus — " At the original institution of the Sabbath, one special reason is assigned for its celebration, ' On the seventh day God ended His work which He had made, and He rested the seventh day from all His work which He had made, and God blessed the Sabbath day and sanc- tified it, because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made' (Gen. ii. 2, 3). The Sabbath was thus originally an instituted comme- moration of the great work of creation — a day to keep men in mind of the origin and of the Divine Originator of all things, of the power and wisdom and goodness of the all-glorious Creator, and of the duty of fearing, loving, worshipping, and serving Him. This was the grand primary reason of the institution and by no change has this reason ever been superseded. But when the law of the Sabbath was long after enjoined Dr. Wardlaws Argument. 103 upon the Jews, while this original reason was assigned for it as retaining all its force, an additional reason, arising out of their own circumstances, and the special kindness of Jehovah towards them, supervenes upon the former — is not substituted for it but associated with it — ' Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord hath commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God ; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates, that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest as well as thou. And remem- ber that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm : therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sahhath day' (Deut. v. 12-15). That the latter reason is not a substituted but an added one, is mani- fest from the fact that when the commandment was announced along with the rest by the voice of Jehovah from Sinai, the original reason alone is mentioned. " It is thus proved that, though the primary reason could not be annulled, others might be added to it. If a second might, so might a third. Let the supposition then be made that at 'the fulness of the time,' the completion of the Saviour's redeeming work had been assigned as a new reason for the celebration of the Sabbath, and that the day had at the same time been retained. Had this been done, we should have been in precisely the same circumstances (only with the im- portant exception of the immense superiority of our additional reason to theirs) with the ancient Israelites, when their deliverance from Egypt was superinduced upon the original reason of the Sabbatic celebration. But mark the difference. The transcendent excellence I04 Our Rest- Day, and glory of the work of redemption, and the surpass- ing preciousness of its blessings, will not admit of its having the place of a mere additional reason for the keeping of the day. It must become the chief. It must have the first place. It must take precedence even of creation. First in the Divine estimate of greatness, it must be first in man's grateful and rever- ential commemoration. How then shall this priority be marked ? How shall the superior importance of re- demption be recognised and testified in the celebra- tion ? Why, in order to give it the lead, the day shall be changed. Creation had the day before ; Redemp- tion shall have it now. Not in either case exclusively, for as, from the time of the first promise, God was worshipped as Redeemer as well as Creator, so from the time of the fulfilment of the promise by the fin- ished work of Christ, He continues to be worshipped as Creator as well as Redeemer. But His glory as seen in the face of Jesus, in the wonders of that work of salvation into which angels desire to look, surpass- ing His glory in the external universe, and the benefit to man from the one so prodigiously exceeding that arising to Him from the provisions of the other. He is specially owned and adored on the Christian Sabbath, in the character of ' the God of our salvation.' Now, such an arrangement recommends itself to our minds as reasonable and right. "* There can be no doubt then that the day has been changed, changed for adequate reasons and by adequate authority. True, there is to be found in the New Testament no express command bidding us in so many words keep the first day and not the seventh. But no one who knows anything of the spirit or style of the book would expect such a command. The New Testa- ment contains no Decalogue. It is a book of great * The Divine Authority and Permanent Obligation of the Sab- hath, by Rev. Ralph Wardlaw, D.D., 25. The Jewish and Christian Sabbaths. 105 principles rather than of precise and formal legislation. If we are to wait until we get formal deliverances from it on every point of Christian economy, we must per- force leave many an important question unanswered, and many a doctrine now most surely believed among us must be relegated to the region of uncertainty. More questions than that of the proper day for the observance of the Sabbath are left in its pages without an express answer delivered in so many words. But there are other modes of expressing the will of God besides the mode of formal legislation. The example of Christ is as binding as His command. The practice of Apostles is itself the best legislation, and if, as we have endeavoured to show, this Apostolic practice necessarily implies a command from the Master, and if it is inconceivable, almost impossible, that the ApostoKc College could have led the Church to change a practice which had existed for thousands of years without hav- ing first received from Christ directions on the subject, then we have for this change the clearest warrant, one which fully accounts for and justifies the practice of Christendom in the matter. The truth is, the Jewish Sabbath had in Christ's day become a dead and efiete and corrupt thing. There was no life about it, and as little of either beauty or utility. It was time for it to disappear ; and it did, both the day and its spirit. It had decayed and waxed old, and was ready to vanish away, and gently, but firmly, Jesus touched it and it was gone. It was buried beside Him in the new tomb, but unlike Him never saw a resurrection, and never will. But as, in ancient fable, from the dead ashes of one bird arose another, not only far more beautiful, but gifted with immortality, so out of the grave of the Jewish Sabbath arose the Christian, beautiful as its author, and destined to live on till the Sabbath of earth melts into that of heaven. It is the same as the Jewish, and yet not the io6 Our Rest-Day. same, — the same, as the Christian is the same man after his conversion as he was before, the same as the spiritual body which we shall assume at the resurrec- tion will be the same as we have now, but not the same, differing from its predecessor as the new creature in Christ differs from the old man, or as the heavenly- body from the earthly. It is the same Sabbath which proceeded from the hand of Deity at the beginning, the day altered, but the thing itself unaltered. Yet it is not the same, for it has been rehabilitated and re- baptised, and now breathes as it never did, and never could before, the name not merely of a Creator but of a risen Redeemer. CHAPTER X. THE CHURCH OF ROME AND THE SABBATH. JHE Church of Rome subjects the Decalogue to very remarkable treatment. Perhaps enough of public attention has not been turned to this. It may be worth while, therefore, to describe it with all due conciseness. I. First of all, the Church of Rome mutilates the entire Decalogue in the most shameful manner. That the reader may judge for himself on this subject, I give here the Romish version of the Ten Command- ments as they are printed in "The Most Rev. Dr. James Butler's Catechism, revised, enlarged, approved, and recommended by the four Roman Catholic Arch- bishops of Ireland, as a general Catechism for the kingdom." " Q. Say the Ten Commandments of God ? A. (1.) I am the Lord thy God — thou shalt not have strange gods before Me. (2.) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. (3.) Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day. (4.) Honour thy father and thy mother. (5.) Thou shalt not kill. (6.) Thou shalt not commit adultery. (7.) Thou shalt not steal. (8.) Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. (9.) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour s wife. (10.) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods." io8 Our Rest-Day, Too much attention cannot be turned to this version (or perversion), in these days when the Komish Church is asserting herself with such lofty claims in these lands, and when unhappily she has succeeded in lead- ing captive so many unwary souls. The more we look into it, the more reason we see to wonder at the un- blushing effrontery of any body, pretending to be a Church of God, daring to deal with a law of heaven as the Church of Rome has here dealt with the Decalogue. Notice — {a) One entire Commandment, the Second, she has boldly omitted altogether. The reason is very plain. That Commandment emphatically denounces such graven images, and such bowing down to them, as are to be seen any day in every Romish chapel in the world. It would, therefore, have been a highly in- convenient and uncomfortable thing for her to put that Commandment into the hands of her votaries. She could not do so. Her own condemnation is written in it. So, impiously audacious though the act is, she cuts the Gordian knot by eliminating the Commandment from the Decalogue altogether. No body of men on earth, professing to be a Christian Church, would have dared to commit such an act but herself But Rome shrinks from nothing. No wonder she keeps the Holy Scriptures from her people. If they looked into them they would see, all too plainly, how different the teach- ing of their Church is from that contained there. * (6.) In several of the other Commandments we find * The Synod of Toulouse, held in the year 1229, ordained as follows— "We prohibit also the laity to have the books of the Old or New Testament, unless any one should wish from a feel- ing of devotion to have a Psalter or Breviary for Divine service, or ' The Hours of the Blessed Virgin.' But we strictly forbid them to have the above-mentioned books in the vulgar tongue." And the Council of Trent declared that "if the Holy Scriptures, translated into the vulgar tongue, be allowed to every one, the temerity of men will cause more evil than good to arise out of it." The Church of Rome and the Sabbath. 1 09 alterations or omissions deliberately made. From the Third (their second, owing to the omission of the Second) the solemn sanction is omitted — " For the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain." In the Fourth (the third with them), only the opening words are retained ; all the remainder is left out. In the Fifth (their fourth), the beautiful words which make it " the first commandment with promise," are deleted. The Tenth, to make up for and conceal the expunging of the Second, and to hide the fact from the people that they have not really Ten Command- ments, but only nine, is cut in two, each piece being called a commandment. What language is strong enough to apply to this unholy mangling of the Divine law ? But even worse is yet to come. For — (c.) The Church of Eome actually adds to the Ten Commandments six more of her own. Butler's Cate- chism, from which we have quoted already, the autho- rised Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, which bears the imprimatur of the Irish archbishops, says, after treating of the Commandments — " Q. Are there any other commandments besides the Ten Commandments of God ? A. Yes ; the commandments or precepts of the Church, which are chiefly six. Q. Say the Six Commandments of the Church ? A. (1.) To hear Mass on Sundays and all holy-days of obligation. (2.) To fast and abstain on the days commanded. (3.) To confess our sins at least once a year. (4.) To receive worthily the blessed Eucharist at Easter, or within the time appointed, i.e., from Ash Wednesday to the octave day of SS. Peter and Paul inclusive. (5.) To contribute to the support of our pastors. (6.) Not to solemnise marriage at the for- bidden time, nor to marry persons within the forbidden degrees of kindred, or otherwise prohibited by the Church, nor clandestinely." I lo Our Rest-Day, Have the words with which the canon of Scripture closes, no terror for the authorities of the Church of Rome — " If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book, and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away His part out of the Book of Life and out of the Holy City, and from the things that are written in this book?" What a difference there is between God's Ten Com- mandments and Rome's six! Put any two of them together and the contrast is striking. The puerility and littleness of the one code strike one as forcibly and immediately as the lofty dignity and moral gran- deur of the other. II. But we are specially concerned here with the Fourth Commandment. As to it — (a.) We have already noticed that but a little bit of it is recognised by the Church of Rome — only the opening words. By what authority does she with- hold the rest of it from her people ? (6.) Her theory of Sabbath observance may be gathered from the following further quotation from Butler— " Q. Say the third Commandment. A. Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day. Q. What is commanded by the Third Command- ment ? A. To spend the Sunday in prayer and other religi- ous duties. Q. Which are the chief duties of religion in which we should spend the Sunday ? A. Hearing mass devoutly, attending vespers or evening prayers, reading moral and pious books, and going to Communion. Q. Is the hearing of mass sufficient to sanctify the Sunday ? The Maynooth Catechism. 1 1 1 A. No ; a part of the day should also be given to prayer and other good works. Q. What particular good works are recommended to sanctify the Sunday ? A. The works of mercy, spiritual and corporal, and particularly to instruct the ignorant in the way of salvation, by word and example. Q. What is forbidden in the Third Command- ment ? A. All unnecessary servile work, and whatever may hinder the due observance of the Lord's day or tend to profane it. Q. Is the sin the greater by being committed on the Lord's Day ? A. Most certainly." In another Catechism, widely used in Ireland, " The Catechism ordered by the National Synod of Maynooth and approved by the Cardinal, the Archbishops, and tiie Bishops of Ireland," there is a slight difference as regards the directions for Sabbath observance. As the subject is important, we give its teaching on the sub- ject in full : — " Q. What is commanded by the Third Command- ment ? A. We are commanded by the Third Commandment to sanctify the Sunday by prayer and other rehgious duties. Q. Which is the chief duty of religion by which we are to sanctify the Sunday ? A. The chief duty of religion, by which we should sanctify the Sunday, is the hearing of mass devoutly. Q. What other good works are particularly recom- mended to sanctify the Sunday ? A. The other particular good works recommended to sanctify the Sunday are to attend vespers or even- ing devotions, to read pious books, and to perform the works of mercy, spiritual and corporal, particularly to 112 Our Rest-Day. instruct the ignorant in the way of salvation, both by- word and example. Q. What is forbidden by the Third Commandment. A. The Third Commandment forbids all unnecessary servile work on Sunday, and whatever may hinder the due observance of the Lord's Day or may tend to pro- fane it." Butler's Catechism tells us (1) that the Third Com- mandment requires us to " spend the Sunday in prayer and other religious duties." The Maynooth Catechism says we are commanded to "sanctify" the day by these. There is a great difference between the two statements. The one necessarily takes in the entire day, the other may or may not, as the reader pleases. Butler (2) places the hearing of mass along with other duties, in the same category. The Maynooth manual makes the hearing of mass " the chief duty of religion by which we are to sanctify the Sunday." Other good works are only "particularly recommended," and, while in most parts this Catechism is only a reprint of Butler, its compilers have deliberately left out the question and answer, — "Is the hearing of mass sufficient to sanctify the Sunday ? No ; a part of the day should also be given to prayer and other good works," and also the question and answer — " Is the sin the greater by being committed on the Lord's Day ? Most cer- tainly." This last catechism bears the date 1883, and has on the title-page the impriTnatur of Cardinal M'Cabe, the recently deceased Roman Catholic primate of Ireland. It is therefore to be taken as containing the latest teaching of the Romish Church in this country. That teaching is quite in accordance with what all who have studied the recent history and de- velopments of Romanism in the Green Isle know — viz., that it lays the great stress on the hearing of mass. Everything else is subordinated to that. It is the chief duty of the Sabbath, which, once performed, The Sabbath and " Holy -Days" 1 13 the worshipper may spend the remainder of the day as he pleases. {c.) There is this further to be said of the teaching^ of Rome on the subject, that she grievously weakens the foundations of the Sabbath by the manner in which she multiplies her holy-days of various kinds, and ranks them along with or above the Sabbath. Both depend, according to her, on the authoritative tradition of the Church for their authority. Cardinal Bellarmine argues that it must be allowable in the true Church to make Saints' Days of human appoint- ment binding on the conscience, because, otherwise, the Church would have no sacred days at all, since none whatever are enjoined in the New Testament ! From the fact, thus admitted by Bellarmine, that no holy-days are enjoined in the New Testament, might we not have expected a somewhat different conclusion to be drawn, viz., that a Church which desires to con- form itself to the pattern shown in the Word would also have no holy-days ? Not so the Church of Rome, however. She classes " Sundays " and " holy-days of obligation " together. Thus Butler says (Cat. p. 39) : " Q. What are your first and chief duties on Sundays and kept holy-days ? A. To hear mass devoutly, and in every other re- spect to keep them holy. Q. Is it a mortal sin not to hear mass on a Sunday or a kept holy-day ? A. It is, if the omission be culpable. Q. How are we to keep holy-days ? A. As we should keep Sundays." The holy Sabbath is therefore no more to the Romanist than Ash Wednesday or Good Friday or Christmas Day. Practically, indeed, it stands on a much lower platform. But, in its foundation, it is just the same. Now, see how this operates. The Sabbath being just a holy-day, like any other, has, of H 1 14 Our Rest- Day. •course, just the same amount of sanctity. The Al- mighty, therefore, is simply entitled to the same hom- age on Sunday that St. Bridget or St. Denis receives on a Saint's day. He is degraded to the level of the multitude of men and women whom Rome has canon- ised — that wondrous bevy, some of whom are alto- gether mythical and others such remarkable specimens of sainthood, if history speaks truly, that it would be well if they were mythical too. What an insult is thereby offered to the One object of worship need not be dwelt upon. But more, the holy-day being parti- cularly a day of pleasure, after the morning observ- ance required by the Church has been attended to, the Holy Day — the Sabbath — is naturally and logically enough concluded to be the same, and, hence, we have the secret of that half-day, or less than half -day, re- gard for the Sabbath which is characteristic of all Romish countries, and all Romish districts of Protes- tant countries. This leads us to notice — (c?.) The practical teaching of Rome on this subject of the Sabbath. Reading her views in the catechisms from which we have been quoting, especially in But- ler's, one might think that in some respects she had a high ideal of the Sabbath. He speaks of spending the day " in prayer and other religious duties," and certain " particular good works " are also recommended to be done upon the Lord's Day. But teaching and practice do not always coincide, and it is an open secret that in this matter of Sabbath observance the practice of the Romish communion is very far, indeed, from being a sanctification of the entire day. The hearing of mass is the great duty. No good Catholic neglects that. But, mass over, the rest of the day is practically free, and, as a rule, Roman Catholics feel at liberty to devote the remaining hours to recreation. You will find nothing worthy of being called Sabbath observ- ance in Romish countries. The day is simply a holi- The National Leagtie and the Sabbath. 1 15 ■day — sometimes not even that. Take France as an example. What Sabbath is to be found there ? Yet what protest is heard from the Romish Church in France against the theatres and horse races and con- certs and open shops which are the rule on the Day of Rest ? Or go to the South and West of Ireland. There Romanism is dominant. It has moulded the character and tinctured the life of the great mass of the people for centuries, and it rules them still. What Sabbath has it given them ? None worthy of the name. Recent years have exhibited this character- istic of Romanism in a very repulsive light. The Sab- bath has usually been the chosen day for the monster meetino^s of the Land Leaonie, and its successor, the National League. The parish priest has come from the celebration of mass to attend these s^atherino^s, and has listened while the vilest theories have been advo- cated by " sons of the Church." Disloyalty, sedition, robbery, and murder have been preached as sacred duties, and all this on the day which, according to the authoritative Catechism, authorised by the four archbishops, is to be spent in " prayer and other religious duties." A beautiful correspondence truly between the teaching and the practice of the infallible Church ! Worse still, the Sabbath has been selected as the day for the commission of some of the most ap- palling murders which have disgraced the name of Irishman during the late "reign of terror" in this country. It was on the Sabbath, when returning from Church, that Mrs. Barlow Smythe of Barba villa was shot dead in her carriage by Romish emissaries of the Land League, the fiendish wretches seeming to have determiaed to give their deed the additional horror of being committed when all around spoke of peace and heaven ; and we have not heard of any denunciation of this crime, committed by sons of " Holy Mother Church," beiog uttered by any of the Romish autho- 1 1 6 Our Rest-Day. rities. The informer Carey repeatedly swore, during- the trials o£ the " Invincibles " in Dublin, that he went directly from mass or confession to his infamous work of murder. The fact is, that whatever her outward or formal teaching may be, the Church of Rome has no Sabbath worthy of the name, and, because she has none, the mass of her devotees wallow in such an ignorance of God as leaves them a ready prey to de- signing agitators. Let any one compare Ulster, which the hands of sturdy Presbyterians have transformed from a bleak morass into a fertile garden, and which their teaching and example and influence have endowed with the priceless blessing of quiet and well kept Sabbaths, with Connaught, where Popery has reigned supreme for many generations, — let him contrast Scotland, with her sweet Sabbath-keeping, which is undoubt- edly one of her greatest glories, as it has been one of the most fertile sources of her intelligence and reli- gious stability, with Spain or France, where a Sabbath, in the true sense, is unknown, and he must acknow- ledge that there is more than a coincidence in the fact that the Sabbath-keeping peoples are the intelligent and prosperous and loyal peoples. Experience teaches that, in another sense than that meant by the sacred writer, he that oflends in this one point is guilty of all, while in the keeping of this Fourth Commandment there is the great reward that it is usually found accompanied by the keeping of all the rest. It has been beautifully said that the Sabbath is the ring which marries Creation to the Creator. Let that mar- riage ring be dishonoured, or broken, or thrown away, and who can wonder if the laws and the love of God are all forgotten or cast off ? CHAPTER XI HINTS ON SABBATB OBSEBVANCE. what mode should the Sabbath be observed? The New Testament does not lay down any spe- cific laws nor go into any minute details on the subject. It does not specify precisely what things are proper to be done on the Sabbath, and what things are improper. This is not its practice. It is charac- teristically a book, not of details, but of principles, which can easily be gathered from it by the dihgent inquirer, and the proper working out of those prin- ciples into detail gives the full mind of the Holy Ghost. With regard to this question of Sabbath ob- servance, there is in the New Testament no table of things prohibited, or of things allowed, on the Sabbath. Herein the Christian Sabbath stands in a remarkably different position from the Jewish. Under the Cere- monial and Judicial laws of the Old Testament, the proper observance of the day was hedged in by a series of stringent regulations, the breach of which was punishable by severe penalties. There is nothing of all this in the New Testament. It gives us great principles on the subject, and great principles only, leaving their application to the individual conscience. The advantages of this course are obvious. Some might imagine that it would have been better if it had been strictly and precisely laid down in full detail how the Sabbath is to be spent. They might think that if men had placed before them, on the authority of the 1 1 8 Ou7^ Rest-Day. Word of God, the precise path in which they are ta walk on the Sabbath Day, they would at once walk in it, whereas now, it may be argued, time and study are required to find out what is the correct mode of keeping the Sabbath, and opinions may and do difier as to many particular details thereof. A little careful reflection, however, will suffice to show that God's plan is best. No code of Sabbath observance,, no matter how comprehensive, could cover every possible case. Regulations wliich would have suited the first century would have been found quite inade- quate to meet the circumstances of the nineteenth. Rules good for an Oriental nation would be quite un- suitable for Western peoples. Therefore, no matter how full the Sabbath code might be, it would contin- ually occur that men, finding no regulation applicable to their particular case, would be left to themselves to decide as to the right course. Besides, no field for the free action of responsibility would be left by the plan we are speaking of, and men, finding themselves treated as mere children, would be apt to become children again, whereas, under the system adopted by Supreme Wisdom, no case can possibly arise which is not met. The principles laid down in the New Testament, or which can readily be formulated from the information which it supplies, cover the entire ground, while, at the same time, full scope is left for each individual to exercise his judgment in the dis- covery of the mind of God, and he is left, as a respon- sible moral agent, to regulate his conduct, as in the sight of God, in accordance with these principles. The great principle, according to which Sabbath ob- servance should be regulated, is plainly this, — it should be kept by every man as a day of holy rest for himself^ and so as not to interfere with its being kept as a day of holy rest by others. The Divine enactments com- bine with the necessities of our own experience to Some Sabbath Work Unavoidable. 1 1 9 demand this twofold care, and it will be found that, by carefully seeking to do nothing ourselves on the Sabbath inconsistent with the idea of a holy Rest-Day, and by taking care to demand no service from others which would be at variance with the same idea, while, positively, we seek to enter into the spirit of the com- mand, " Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,'* and lead others to do the same, we shall best conform to the will of our great Lawgiver, That some Sabbath work is unavoidable is obvious. In our houses it is impossible to dispense altogether with the services of domestics on that day, and public requirements necessitate the employment of the police and other oflScials. For ministers of the Gospel, also, instead of the Sabbath being a day of rest, it is the day of hardest work of all the week. All such cases are covered by the principle which our Lord lays down in the words — " It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath Day." There is in the law of the Sabbath no such narrow Pharisaic tone as would turn the day into a time of stern asceticism, or privation, or gloomy aus- terity. On the contrary, it is intended to be, in the highest sense, a day of joy. There is full liberty to do all works which can be ranged under the heads of works of necessity or mercy, either to man or beast ? What is required is a generous consideration of the right of all parties concerned, a consideration of them in the light of God's law and Christ's example, not forgetting that important master-key, which opens so many locks whose intricate wards baffle all other modes of dealing with them — " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets." One thing is clear, if the Sabbath is to be enjoyed and thoroughly profited by, it must be prepared for. But how often this is forgotten ! Let any one take a walk, for example, through the business streets of any 1 20 Our Rest-Day, of our large towns on Saturday evening — let him note the crowds of people that throng the footways and fill the shops, up till ten, eleven, even twelve o'clock — let him remember that many of these purchasers have still household duties to perform on their return to their homes, and that the unfortunate shopkeepers and their assistants have the same, and he must see how difficult it will be for all these people to get into a right frame either of mind or body for the duties and privileges of the Sabbath. It is not our province here to speak of the disadvantages under which shopping is conducted at these untimely hours. Goods cannot be correctly judged in the flaring gas- light, as the housekeeper sometimes finds to her cost when Sabbath morning's sun shines on her purchases. Then the head of the house, who frequently accom- panies his wife on these Saturday night shopping expeditions, is too often tempted by the brilliantly lighted windows of the public-house to turn in and refresh himself with a glass — the one glass which, in so many cases, proves the prelude to a drunken orgie. But, leaving all this out of account, what we are concerned to urge here is the entire incompati- bility of such a mode of spending the late hours of Saturday night with the prospect of a comfortable and profitable Sabbath. Begin with the shopkeeper and his assistants. When they are able to retire to rest in the small hours of the Sabbath morning they are utterly fagged and worn out. Naturally they sleep late and rise with the remnant of the fatigues of the previous day still upon them. It is a scramble (some- times an impossibility) to get the children to Sabbath School in time — another scramble (sometimes another impossibility) to get to church. Probably it is reached late, and the service is entered upon without that calm and reverent mental attitude which is so needful for the proper and profitable enjoyment of the ministra- Saturday Night Shopping, 121 tions of the sanctuary. The occupations of the entire day are marred by the remains of the weariness of that Saturday night. With the shopkeeper's customer, matters are not much better. Now why should not the system of the early closing of shops and other places of business on Saturday night be more gener- ally adopted ? Why should not householders en- deavour to lay in their stock of needful goods at a more seasonable hour ? It would unquestionably be better for their pockets if they did so. But not on this ground — on the ground of consideration for their toil-worn sisters and brothers in these shops, who are kept standing behind the counter for twelve, fourteen, or sixteen hours every Saturday, accommodating cus- tomers up till a late hour who in most cases could have done their marketing quite as conveniently long before — and on the ground of regard for themselves and their own best interests and those of their families, we plead for this reform.* We see no reason in the world why, in the vast majority of cases, all shops could not be closed by six o'clock on Saturday evening. Then the Sabbath would have a chance of being properly prepared for. Everything could then be got into readiness for giving a right loyal greeting to the King's messenger on his arrival — got into readiness in such good time, that, instead of retiring to rest wearier than on other nights, a foretaste of the rest of the Day of Rest would be enjoyed beforehand — Sabbath morn- ing would awake the slumberer from a sleep that would be indeed refreshing — an early and united gathering round the family altar would attune all * The earlier closing of public-houses on Saturday -would be a great boon in this connection. Already in Scotland an Act for their earlier closing every night in the week has come into opera- tion. Throughout almost the whole of the country (except, alas ! the large towns, where the reform is most needed), they are now obliged to shut up at ten o'clock. 12 2 Our Rest- Day. hearts for the duties of the day — the House of Prayer would be sought in good time — and the Word of the Lord would drop upon the soul like the dew of Her- mon. Nothing on earth is likely to be well done un- less prepared for. The Sabbath is no exception to the rule.* The writer has before his mind, as he pens these words, the recollection of such a home, of which he knew something in days gone by. From Saturday morning in that home the Sabbath was seen to be approaching. Everything was got in readiness for it betimes. All purchases of household necessaries were made early, all preparatory household duties per- formed, the children taught to put away their toys and week-day story-books, and provide supplies for pets, that the Sabbath might be clear of all tempta- tion. Well does he recollect the peculiarly fervent prayers that were offered up at the family altar that evening. They were probably longer than usual — certainly there was an aroma about them above ordi- nary. The children were early abed, for on Sabbath morning there was no shortening of the day by undue indulgence in slumber in that house. If no earlier astir on that morning than usual, the family was no- later. They were taught to give God honestly a day of the same length as they gave themselves. Then,, if the Saturday night's family prayer was peculiarly impressive and solemn — what is to be said of the Sabbath morning's, so full of a holy unction, but yet- with an infinite spirit of happiness about it — an air * During the last illness of the late General Grant, Ex-Presi- dent of the United States of America, one Saturday night, when. he was nervous and weary and restless, his son, hoping to divert his mind, suggested some amusement. The General brightened at the idea of diversion, but presently, with a grave face, he- inquired the hour. It was nearly midnight. "Never mind," he said, with perfect resignation, "it is too close to the Sabbath to commence any diversion." A Sabbath of the Old Sort. 123 of true enjoyment, as if a day had indeed come, on which, not in mere conventional phrase, but in blessed reality, we were to " rejoice and be glad." Then came the walk to church — no hurried race as if to catch a train, but a quiet, seemly journey to the House of God, even the young folks needing no repressive measure to curb them, so well had they imbibed the spirit which breathed from their parents. Then the service — how well one can recall it — is it merely " distance that lends enchantment to the view ? " Does the beauty with which it shines back upon us come only of the mellowing effect of the receding vista of years through which the scene is viewed ? Or, were these Sabbaths of long ago really brighter thnn the Sab- baths of to-day ? Who can tell ? To the writer it seems as if, listening to the footsteps of those Sabbaths of other years, as they echo through the corridors of time, passing ever further and further away until they seem lost in the distance, there have been no such Sabbaths since. How blessed were the gatherings round the social board that day ! A happy light seemed to sit on every face. It was a resting day in truth. And then its closing hours at night! One can almost hear again the strains of that Sabbath evening psalm : " The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want," sung to old Martyrdom, or " I to the hills will lift mine eyes," to French, or * ' O thou my soul, bless God the Lord," to plaintive and wild old Coleshill. Then all retired to rest — not glad that the Sabbath was over. There was no such feeling. It was a happy day, and all the memories it left behind were happy too. Why should 124 Our Rest- Day, not a Sabbath of such a type be the rule, and not the exception ? What a brighter, better world we should have, if its highways were all hung along with such Sabbath lamps, shedding their soft light on the way- farer as he moves forward towards the great bright Light at the further end ! * Robert Burns ought to be forgiven many a fault by his countrymen for the sake of his glorious " Cotter's Saturday Night." What could be more beautiful or more suggestive than these lines, which cannot be too often repeated — " The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, They round the ingle form a circle wide ; The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace. The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride. His bonnet reverently is laid aside. His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare ; Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide He wales a portion wi' judicious care, And ' Let us worship God ' he says wi' solemn air. They chant their artless notes in simple guise : They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim : Perhaps 'Dundee's' wild, warbling measures rise, Or plaintive 'Martyrs,' worthy of the name ; Or noble ' Elgin ' beets the heavenward flame, * " We are citizens of two worlds. The majority of souls are not here on the lonely shore that we call the earth. They are in the unseen holy places awaiting us. One day in seven is not too much time in which to educate ourselves for the world into which we haste. Let us ask what it is that the great cloud of souls above us longs most to hear from the earth. Is it the sound of the pick-axe in the mine ; the whir of the wheel in the factory, wearing out the life of childhood or of womanhood ; the clink of dollars in the tills of capitalists ? My conviction is that when those of whom we have been bereaved look backward and remember our low estate, what they wish most of all is to see the globe enswathed from pole to pole with holy Sabbaths, and shedding saved souls into the spaces beyond death." — Joseph Cook. Burns s '' Cotte7's Saturday Nights 125 The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays : Compared with these Italian trills are tame : The tickled ears no heartfelt raptures raise, Nae unison hae they with our Creator's name. The priestlike father reads the sacred page, How Aaron was the friend of God on high ; Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage With Amalek's ungracious progeny ; Or how the royal bard did groaning lie Beneath the stroke of heaven's avenging ire ; Or Job's pathetic plaint and wailing cry, Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire ; Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre. Perhaps, the Christian volume is the theme — How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed ; How He who bore in Heaven the second name Had not on earth whereon to lay His head ; How His first followers and servants sped, The precepts sage they wrote to many a land ; How He who lone in Patmos banished Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand. And heard great Babylon's doom pronounced by Heaven's command. Then kneeling down to Heaven's eternal King, The saint, the father, and the husband prays. Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing That thus they all shall meet in future days ; There ever bask in uncreated rays. No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear. Together hymning their Creator's praise, In such society, yet still more dear. While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere." A Saturday night like that could scarce fail to be followed by a Sabbath of blessing. CHAPTER XII. SUNDAY TRADING. fHE times in which we live have seen many changes with regard to the observance of the Day of Rest. In some respects we have unques- tionably advanced. In others we have as certainly retrograded. Let us, in this chapter, glance at what has been done and is being done in regard to Sunday trading. One of the most important social reforms of our day has been the Sunday Closing of Public Houses. The present position of this movement is as follows: — Scotland occupies the premier place, not only in point of time, but of thoroughness. She led the van of the army of progress, having been the first of the three kinofdoms to demand and obtain from the Legislature the boon of Sunday closing, and she enjoys it in the completest manner. Ireland comes next. In 1878 she obtained her Sunday Closing Act, but it is one by no means so complete as the Scotch. It is marred by an " exemption clause " which permits the opening of public-houses on the Lord's Day during the hours from 2 till 7 P.M. in the five cities of Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, and Waterford, and by a "bona fide tra- veller" clause which presents a ready door for the evasion of the requirements of the law. Wales is also now in the enjoyment of a Sunday Closing law, having been the last of the three countries mentioned to obtain it. England has not yet followed in the wake of her Sunday Closing, 127 •sister kingdoms, and it is surely a pity that she, the most powerful and influential and populous of them all, should be the last to procure for herself^ and to enjoy, this boon of freedom from the open Sunday tavern. There are not wanting signs of the existence of a most earnest desire, in this direction, on the part of large portions of the English community. * We trust that ere long the convictions of the entire country will be so aroused that a law will be obtained, extend- ing the Acts which have wrought so well in Scotland and Ireland to England. It may hearten and stimu- late advocates of this course to give here the results of the five years' experiment of Sunday Closing in Ire- land. They are as follows : — " 1st. A decrease of Sun- day arrests in the Sunday Closing area of 53 per cent. 2nd. A decrease on a smaller scale in Sunday arrests in the five cities on the short time system. 3rd. A reduction in the drink bill of the nation amounting to h\ millions of pounds sterling, comparing the quin- quennial period before Sunday closing with the same period following it. 4th. A very great decrease in the arrests for general drunkenness." f Surely there is here a most gratifying and encouraging result. When it was first proposed to try Sunday Closing in Ireland, many and emphatic were the prophecies of failure, and * The following statement, showing the number of licenses issued for the sale of intoxicating liquors, to be consumed on the premises, in England, Scotland and Ireland respectively, in the year ended March 31st, 1887, distinguishing the ordinary seven- day licenses from those issued for sale on six days only, speaks for itself. England . Scotland . Ireland . United Kingdom n7,840 14,396 132,236 + A Social Experiment ; or, Five Tears hefoi'e and after /Sunday -^5^^