5

that repliest against God? Has the Almighty declared, that every returning seventh day should be given to rest and devotion, and shall man presume to say that it is not fitting? The Creator blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it, and shall the creature annul the blessing, and pronounce that it shall not be sanctified ?"

It is worthy of remark, that many moral duties are recommended in the Sacred Volume, which are not the subject of a specific command in either of the two tables; while the injunction to keep holy the sabbath day is expressly recorded in the decalogue. The inference has been drawn, that this duty involves an obligation more peremptory and constraining than those which have not the same mark of distinction affixed to them. Of this at least we are certain, that from its having been written by the finger of God on the tables of stone, equally with the other commands, which are allowed to be

5

Romans xi. 20.

6

Appendix I.

binding on all men, it is clearly a moral precept, and therefore of perpetual and universal obligation.

The departure from the strict letter of the original command, and the substitution of the first day instead of the seventh as holy to the Lord, may seem to some to militate against the perpetuity of the obligation. A change indeed has been made, but not without reason, or due authority; nor does that change affect the moral part of the precept. The sabbath was made for man: and the specific object of it is equally provided for by the observance of a seventh day of rest and devotion, whether that day be the first or the last. The seventh was, no doubt, originally observed, but as the human race spread themselves over the earth, there must necessarily have arisen a variation in the time of keeping it: since in some regions the day is beginning at the very same moment when in others it is 7 Mark ii. 27.

ending. It is therefore evident that the moral obligation of the precept cannot consist in the undeviating observance of the same identical period, and that the day need not be the same in all places and all ages of the world.

The sabbath, as it was promulgated to the Israelites from Mount Sinai, while it comprehended whatever is morally binding on man, possessed certain distinctive features which belonged to them as the peculiar people of God. The reason assigned for their keeping one day in the week holy, is purely national, and it therefore may thus far be classed among those precepts of the law which are of a civil and political, rather than of a moral character. 8 The severe punishments consequent on the breach of the Jewish sabbath are equally peculiar and national. "There was a double reason rendered by God why the Jews should keep that sabbath which they did; one special, as to a

8 Deut. v. 15.

seventh day, to show they worshipped that God who was the Creator of the world; the other individual, to signify their deliverance from the Egyptian bondage from which that seventh day was dated."9

The Christian sabbath, in which the moral obligation of our resting on and hallowing one day in the seven, is fully preserved, unites both the general and the special reason; for while with the patriarchs we commemorate the creation, we celebrate also our Lord's triumphant rising from the grave, whereby he delivered us from spiritual slavery of which the Egyptian house of bondage was a type. Thus it combines, with the acknowledgment of the common benefit of the original creation, the memory" of the transcendent blessing of our new creation to the hope of everlasting life, of which our Lord's resurrection on the first day of the week is a sure pledge and evidence."1

The deliverance of the Israelites from their house of temporal bondage will bear no comparison with the spiritual freedom purchased for all who believe in and obey him by the Captain of our salvation; and the glory of God, in producing all things out of nothing, is infinitely surpassed by the gospel scheme of salvation, whereby the sinner becomes a new creature in Christ,2 and puts on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. The sabbath has, therefore, been changed into the Lord's day, that as the one did continually bring to mind the former world finished by creation, so the other might keep us in perpetual remembrance of a far better world, begun by him who came to restore all things, to make both heaven and earth new."4

3

The practice of the apostles in assembling for the performance of their reli

2 2 Cor. v. 17.

4 Hooker.

3

Eph. iv. 24.