"And he said unto them, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath."-Mark ii. 27.

THE first recommendation of the Sabbath | around and without the line of demarcation. is the place which it occupies in the deca- We see no attempt whatever to violate the logue. There was much of Jewish obser- sanctity of the ground which this line envancy swept away with the ruin of the na-closes. We no where see any express or tional institutions. There was much of it recorded incursion upon any one of the obdesigned for a temporary purpose, and servances of the decalogue. We perceive which fell into disuse among the worship-an Apostle in the New Testament making pers of God after that purpose was accom- his allusion to the fifth of these observances, plished. A Christian of the present day, and calling it the first commandment with looks upon many of the most solemn ser- promise; and by the very notice he bestows vices of Judaism in no other light than as on the arrangement of the duties, are we fragments of a perishable ritual-nor does given to understand, that no attempt had he ever think, that upon himself they have been made to disturb their order, or to deany weight of personal obligation. But this pose any one of them from the place which does not hold true of all the duties and all had been assigned to it. We should count the services of Judaism. There is a broad it an experiment of the most fearful audaciline of distinction between that part of it ty, without the intimation of any act of rewhich is now broken up, and that part of it peal passed in the high legislature of heawhich still retains all the authority of a per- ven, to fly in the face of that Sabbath law, petual and immutable law. Point us out a which stands enrolled among the items of single religious observance of the Hebrews so notable and so illustrious a document; that is now done away, and we are able to and nothing short of a formal and absolute say of it, and of all the others which have recallment can ever tempt us to think, that experienced a similar termination, that they, the new dispensation of the Gospel has every one of them, lie without the compass created so much as one vacancy in that of the ten commandments. They have no register of duties, which bears upon the place whatever in that great record of duty aspect of its whole history the impress of a which was graven on tables of stone, and revealed standard that is unalienable and placed within the holy of holies, under the everlasting. We cannot give up one article mercy-seat. Now, how does the law of the in that series of enactments which, in every Sabbath stand as to this particular? Does it one age of the Christian world, has been lie within or without a limit so tangible, and revealed as a code, not of ceremonial but forming so distinct and so noticeable a line of moral law. We cannot consent, but on of demarcation? We see it then standing the ground of some resistless and overbearwithin this record, of which all the other ing argument, to the mutilation of the induties are of such general and such imper- tegrity of this venerable record. We see ishable obligation. We meet with it in the throughout the whole line of the Jewish interior of that hallowed ground, of which history, that it stood separate and alone; every other part is so sacred and so inviola- and that free from all the marks of national ble. We perceive it occupying its own con- or local peculiarity, it bore upon it none of spicuous place in that register of duties, all the frailty of the other institutions, but has of which have the substance and the irrevo-been preserved and handed down to us an cable permanency of moral principle. On unchanged standard of duty, for all generareading over the other articles of this me- tions. morable code, we see all of them stamped with such enduring characters of obligation, as no time can wear away; and the law of the Sabbath taking its station in the midst of them, and enshrined on each side of it among the immutabilities of truth, and justice, and piety. It is true, that much of Judaism has now fallen into desuetude, and that many of its dearest and most distinguished solemnities are now regarded in no other light than as the obsolete and repealed observances of an antiquated ritual. But it is worthy of being well observed that the whole of this work of demolition took place

We see, at the very commencement of the Mosaic dispensation how God himself thought fit to signalize it; for, from the place where he stood, did he proclaim the ten commandments of the law, in the hearing of the assembled multitude; while every other enactment, whether moral.or ceremonial, was conveyed to the knowledge of the people, through the medium of a human legislator. And we should feel that, in dethroning any one of the perceptive impositions of the decalogue from its authority over our practice, we were bidding defiance to the declared will of the Eternal; and resisting a voice which sounds as loudly and

as impressively to our conscience, as the ] that the moral world went back again into one that issued in thunder from the flaming a wild chaos of dark and disorderly rebeltop of Sinai, and scattered dismay among lion; and the heart of man lost its obethe thousands of Israel.

dience to the attractive influences of that But, secondly, in the practice of the great principle which can alone subdue it Christian world, the Sabbath has been into harmonious accordancy with the law moved forward by one day; and the re- of God; and the resurrection of Christ membrance to which it is now consecrated, from the grave was a mighty and essential is a different one from that of the creation step in the counsels of heaven for quelling of the world. For this change we can find all the violence of this elementary war; no positive enactment; but we can quote" for unless I go away, the comforter canthe uncontrolled observation of it down not come; but if I go to my Father, I shall from the period of the apostolic age. We send him." And from the place which he are sure that a practice so early and so now occupies, does the Spirit come down universal, could not have been introduced at the commission of the exalted Saviour, without the sanction of Heaven's inspired and he moves on the face of this spiritual messengers. And, mark the limit of that chaos, and is ever and anon reclaiming liberty which has been taken with the some portion of a moral and renovated emfourth commandment. It amounts to no-pire from the rugged domain of a world thing more than the circumstantial change lying in wickedness. And the time is yet of a day. Had the early Christians felt to come when this ever-renovating Spirit themselves warranted to take more liberty, shall fulfil its conclusive triumph, by spreadthey would have taken it; for then was the ing an entire aspect of worth, and piety, time when Christianity took its determi- and moral loveliness over the wide extent nate movement away from the practices of of a now sinful creation. the old dispensation, and established all its And thus it is, that while the day of Sabdistinctions as a religion of principle, and a bath has been changed, there is a most afreligion of spiritual character. But widely fecting remembrance which gives to the as the one religion departed from the other, observation of Sabbath the full import and there never, in any one age of the church, significancy of its original purpose-the has been a departure from the observance remembrance of a new creation emerging of a Sabbath, appropriated to the more so- from an old one-the animating view of lemn and peculiar exercises of piety. The life and immortality rising in splendour change in the day goes to prove that Chris- from the corruption of the grave-the contianity is not a religion of mere days. But templation of an ascended Saviour, who while it has abandoned one particular day, pours the promise of the Father on all his you find it transferring itself to another; and believing disciples-and working in them in the choice of that other it is guided by by the Spirit the graces of the new creature, the affecting remembrance of an event, the prepares them for a welcome entrance into contemplation of which is fitted to strength-those regions, where sin is unknown, and en the faith, and to refresh the piety, and where death is swallowed up in victory. to waken the best and most religious feel- But, thirdly, in addition to the slight cirings of those who are spiritually engaged cumstantial change which has been made in it. It commemorates the rise of the upon the Sabbath, and which we are sure crucified Saviour from the grave-of him no honest and enlightened Christian can who is the first fruits of them who slept-ever construe into an entire and absolute of him who by that Spirit which is com-repeal of the whole institution-there is a mitted to him, raises all those who are dead general change affecting every one of the in tresspasses and sins, to newness of life-ten commandments, but which was never of him who is the great agent of Heaven so well understood till the new dispensafor repairing all the disorders and all the tion was fully and fairly ushered into the deformities of the moral world-of him by world. whom, as the word of God, the universe We do not mean to say, that the worwas at first created, but who has since thies of the Old Testament were utter earned a more enduring title to the memory strangers to that doctrine of grace on of Christians, by taking upon him that which the Spirit of God, working in larger great scheme, in virtue of which, there are measure on the minds of the Apostles, from to emerge out of this ruined and rebellious the day of Pentecost, has poured so clear province, a new heaven and a new earth, and so celestial a splendour. We believe wherein dwelleth righteousness. At the that many Jews were, under the shadow of first creation of the world, the Spirit moved their types and their sacrifices, trained to over the turbulence of its confused and jar- the faith, and the humility, and the affecring elements, and awoke them all to or- tionate obedience of creatures who knew der and to harmony. When Adam fell, themselves to be incapable of perfect conwe know not what precise mischief it in-formity to the law of God—and that, in flicted on the material world; but we know the act of serving him. they stood on es

doctrine, that "without holiness no man can see God," it makes him who possesses it, to "walk before God without fear, in righteousness and in holiness." When faith attaches itself to the doctrine that unless ye do such and such commandments, ye shall not inherit the kingdom of God, it makes him who possesses it, feel as constraining an urgency of personal interest in the work of keeping these commandments, as if the old covenant of works had got up again, and he behooved to ply his assiduous task for the rewards of perfect obedience. When faith attaches itself to the doctrine of every man receiving his award at the judgment-seat, according to the deeds done in the body, it makes him who possesses it just strive with as much earnestness to multiply good deeds—as if each performance done at the bidding of the Saviour, was a distinct addition to the treasure reserved for him in heaven. But faith does attach itself to every one of these doctrines, or it is no faith at all. It gives the homage of its reliance to each particular of the law and the testimony. It clears its unfettered way from among the perplexities of human arrangement; and disowning every authority but that of the one master, it sits at his feet with the docility of a little child, and appropriates to its right influence every item of his communications. And thus it is, that the man who is in simplicity and in good faith a believer, while he rejoices all the day long in the sunshine of a countenance which he knows to be friendly to him, labours all the day long at his faithful and assiduous task of doing every thing to the glory of God. There is room enough in his enlarged heart for knowing, that while the one is his offered privilege, the other is his required dutyand free as he is, from all the embroilments of a darkening speculation, he does not wait for the adjustment of any human controversy on the subject, but taking himself to his Bible, he both lives in all the security of the offered reconciliation, and without questioning the simple announcement of the Saviour, that "if ye love me, ye will keep my commandments," he also lives in all the diligence of one who is "steadfast and unmoveable, and always abounding in the work of the Lord."

sentially the same footing of mercy to pardon and grace to help in the time of need, on which a spiritual Christian of the day now feels himself to be so firmly and so conclusively established. The change we are alluding to, then, did not take place at the first settlement of the new dispensation. It only came out at that time into more distinct exhibition; and it consists in this; that whereas the direct and natural way of taking up the promulgated law of God, is to take it up as a law of works, and to labour at the performance of it on the understood condition of "This do, and ye shall live"-and as this condition has not been fulfilled by a single son or daughter of the species, then, unless some new arrangement of the matter between God and man had been entered into, life was forfeited by every one of us, and we should just have been what the New Testament tells us we actually are, anterior to our reception of the Gospel, the children of wrath, and under the full operation of the sentence, that "the soul which sinneth it shall die." Now, it would lead us away from our subject into a most interminable excursion, did we say all that might be pertinently and substantially said on the precise turn which the Gospel has given to the obligation of the law. Eternal life is no longer the wages of perfect obedience. It is the gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The man who has faith to perceive the reality of this gift, lays hold of it, and rejoices in all the enlargement of conscious forgiveness, and in all the cordialities of a secure and confident reconciliation, with the God whom he had offended. But this faith does not set him loose from any one of the duties of obedience. Had no other doctrine been proposed to the believer, than the single one of forgiveness through the redemption that is in the blood of Jesus, then we can conceive how the dawning of the Gospel faith might be a signal for the emancipation of the whole man from the restraints of moral obligation. But other doctrines have been proposed; and faith, which is neither more nor less than a reliance on the divine testimony, gives an equally honest and welcome admission to all the particulars of that testimony. It embraces all the particulars of God's communication; and such is the amplitude of It is true, that there is a difference between its grasp, that though as a principle, it is being under the law, and under grace. But single and undivided, and can be defined how does this difference affect the morality within the limits of a short sentence; yet of a Christian? Let us take the deliverance grant us the existence of this principle, and of an Apostle upon the subject. "Shall we then you grant us room enough, and pro- sin," says Paul, "because we are not under vision enough for giving effect to every the law, but under grace? God forbid." one of the lessons of revelation. When faith attaches itself to the doctine of reconciliation through Christ, it will make him who possesses it, to walk before God withWhen faith attaches itself to the

out fear.

Quite the contrary, for it is precisely because we are under grace, that sin hath not dominion over us. We must shorten this explanation, and bring it to bear on the observation of the Sabbath. The great interest

of practical obedience is upheld under the the Gospel, this law is made to stand in dispensation of the Gospel, by all the securi- another place. It is conveyed, as it were, ties of positive and preceptive obligation. from its old position, on a tablet of stone, But more than this-there is such a change and written in the characters of a living wrought by grace in the heart of every be-epistle on the tablet of a believer's heart. liever, that he not only understands the obli- Now the question we have to put is, in this gation, but is made cordially to acquiesce in it. transference of the law from its old to its There is such a revolution in his desires, that new repository, does any one of its articles it is now his meat and drink to do the will of fall away from it, and is lost, as it were, in that God, against whom there existed within the passage, by being loosened and detached him the most stubborn and revolting en- from the other articles among which it was mity. The man who by faith, now looks incorporated? We can specify some, at on God as his friend, will have no difficulty least, of the ten commandments, which have in understanding this change, for he feels found their way safe and entire to the heart it; and there is not a believer on the face of of him who has embraced the Gospel, and the earth who does not, from the time of his lives under the power of its purifying inbecoming so, love that law which he afore-fluences. We are sure that such a man will time violated. This law was at first graven on tables of stone, and held out for the government of a helpless and guilty race, who were both unable and unwilling to yield to it the loyalty of their obedience; and it therefore served to them for a ministry of condemnation.

have his supreme affections fastened upon God, and renouncing every idol, whether of wealth, or of ambition, or of vanity, that can dethrone the Father of his spirit from his rightful ascendency, he will prefer no one object of regard, or of reverence before him. We are sure that such a man will be When the dispensation of grace was quite in earnest to have a right knowledge brought in, this law was not abrogated. and conception of God-that the Being he One of the most illustrious exercises of the worships may be the true God-and lest, by grace of God, consisted in his putting forth directing his homage to some false and disa device for securing the observance of his torted picture of his own fancy, he may laws, and this device is neither more nor incur all the guilt, and be carried away by less than putting the law in our hearts, and all the delusion of him who falls down to a writing it in our minds. On the change material image, in lowly and bending adotaking place from our being under the law, ration. We are sure that such a man will to our being under grace, the law, to use do honour to the hallowed name of his the language of the Bible, is taken down Master, who is in heaven, and be sickened from the place it formerly occupied on and appalled by that profaneness which is tablets of stone, and from which it frowns so current in many of our companies. We upon us in all the wrath of its violated dig- are sure that such a man will revere his nity; and it is graven on the fleshly tablets | earthly parents, and will stand by them in of the heart-or, in other words, the man is the midst of their sinking infirmities; and endowed with a liking for that which he whether in the form of a declining father, formerly rebelled against. And grant him or a widowed mother, who has thrown the possessed of the genuine principle of faith; whole burden of her dependence on the and there can be no doubt, that the spirit, children who remain to her, we are sure true to his office, has been at work within that he will never turn a contemptuous ear him, and has given a new bent to his affec- to the feebleness of their entreating voicetions, and has turned them to the love of but will bid his proud and aspiring manthose commandments which he aforetime hood give up to their authority all its wayhated and resisted, and has established in wardness, and all its tumultuous indepenhis bosom this omnipotent security for obe- dence. We are quite sure, that in the heart dience, that the taste and the inclinations of of such a man, there is an aspiration of the new creature are now upon his side; kindliness towards every thing that breathes, and as if carried forward by the spontaneous and that the commandment, "Thou shalt and inborn alacrity of a constitutional im- not kill," carries in his bosom the widely pulse, does the man who is thus trans- extended import of thou shalt not conceive formed, and thus acted upon by that Spirit, one purpose, nor carry against a single hufor which he never ceases to pray, run with man being, one rankling sentiment of madelight in the way of all the commandments. lignity. We are sure that such a man, far Now, we have already attempted to satisfy removed from all that is licentious in pracyou, that there is no erasure of the fourth tice, will recoil, even in the unseen solitude commandment from that lettered record of of thought, from all that is licentious in conthe law, which is met with in your Bibles, ception, and spurning away from the pure and where the institution of the Sabbath is sanctuary of his heart every evil and unhalgraven as indelibly as any one of the un-lowed visitation, he will present to the apchangeable moralities among which it is proving eye of Heaven, all the adornments situated. But by the new dispensation of of a spiritual temple, all the graces and all

have gotten their secure and inviolable lodgment within the tablet of a Christian heart? If we look into that heart, do we meet with no trace of the commandment we are in quest of? Will you tell us, that the law of the Sabbath is erased, we will not say from the remembrance, but from the affection of any one of the actual Christians by whom you are surrounded? Has it left behind it a vacancy in that spiritual tablet which is graven by the Spirit of God, when he writes the law in the believer's heart, and puts it into his mind? This is a question of observation-and speaking from our own observation, we never, in the whole round of it, met with a man, drawn by the cords of love to the doing of the other com

the beauties of an unspotted offering. We are sure that such a man, with a hand unsoiled by any one of the gains of injustice, will with all the sensitiveness of high-minded and honourable principle, keep himself as nobly aloof from substantial as from literal dishonesty. He will feel superior to every one of those tolerated artifices, and those practical disguises, which, throughout the great mass of mercantile society, have so hardened and so worn down the consciences of those, who, for years, have been speeding and bustling their way amongst a variety of manifold transactions-and in the high walk of simplicity and godly sincerity, will he carry along with him the impress of one of the peculiar people, amid all the legalized fraudulency of a selfish and un-mandments, and carrying in his heart either. principled generation. We are quite sure that such a man, seeing he had put on the deeds of the new creature, would never suffer the burning infamy of a lie to rest upon him. All that was within him, and about him, would be clear as the ethereal firmament. The wiles of a deceitful policy would be utterly unknown to him. The openness and the ingenuousness of truth, would sit upon his forehead, and his every utterance bear upon it as decided a stamp of authority, as if shielded by a solemn appeal to God and to the judgment-seat. And, lastly, we are quite sure that such a man could not breathe a single avaricious desire after the substance of another. His heart is set on another treasure. He has entered the service of another master than the mammon of unrighteousness. His affections have settled on a more enduring substance. With the eye of faith, he looks to heaven, and to its unfading and unperishable riches; and all the splendours of this world's vain and empty magnificence, sink into worthlessness before them. He can eye the golden career of his more prosperous neighbours, without one wistful sentiment either of covetousness or of envy; and feels not the meanness and the hardships of his humbler condition, amid the tranquillities of a heart that is cherishing a better prospect, and reposing on the sure anticipation of a happier and more enduring home.

a distaste or an indifference for the fourth of them? We may have seen men high in honour, and earning by their integrity the rewards of an unsullied reputation amongst their fellow-citizens, carrying a visible contempt for the Sabbath law throughout the whole line of their Sabbath-history-but all the truth and all the justice of these men are such constitutional virtues as may exist in a character which owns not and feels not the power of godliness; and sure we are that wanting this power, several of the other commandments can be specified, to which they are as utter strangers as to the commandment of the seventh day. We repeat it, therefore, that if you grant us a man who bears about with him in his bosom, a warm and conscientious attachment to all the articles of the decalogue but this one, before we look at him, we say with confidence, that search him, and both in his heart and in his practice, this one is to be found; and that we shall not fail to meet the Sabbath law as firmly established as any other within the secrecies of his bosom, and standing out as conspicuously on the front of his external observations. We never, in the whole course of our recollections, met with a Christian friend, who bore upon his character every other evidence of the Spirit's operation, who did not remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. We appeal to the memory of all the worthies Well, then, in the heart of this man, of who are now lying in their graves, that whom we suppose nothing more than that eminent as they were in every other grace he has drunk in the genius of our better and accomplishment of the new creature, dispensation, we find graven in the most the religiousness of their Sabbath-day shone legible and distinct characters, nine of the with an equal lustre amid the fine assemcommandments. We meet with all the ten blage of virtues which adorn them. In every in the letter of the Old Testament, and we Christian household, it will be found, that find nine out of these ten in a state of most the discipline of a well-ordered Sabbath is vigorous and entire operation, under the never forgotten amongst the other lessons spirit of the New Testament. What has of a Christian education-and we appeal to become of the fourth commandment? Has every individual who now hears us, and it sunk and disappeared under the stormy who carries the remembrance in his bosom vicissitudes of that middle passage, through which all the rest have found their way, from the tablets of a literal inscription, and

of a father's worth, and a father's piety, if on the coming round of the seventh day, an air of peculiar sacredness did not spread it