the stipulations of the covenant be complied with.

May we all finally be saved through the precious blood of this holy victim. The very

best and sincerest Christian amongst us, has, in many instances, strayed from the path of duty. "There is none that doeth good, no, not one." "All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."

To him then let us look. Let our eyes be spiritually fixed on the cross whereon he suffered. Let us turn towards his bleeding body with the gazing earnestness of faith. Let us believe in him, and obey him; and we shall obtain mercy to our souls.

101

SERMON VII.

THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH.

EXODUS XX. 8.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

SUCH was the emphatic injunction delivered from Mount Sinai, by the Lord and Father of the human race. It was one of those eternal, immutable laws, which issued from the voice of the Omnipotent, amid thunderings, and lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the smoke that went up from the mountain. Transmitted to us from this high authority, it is inscribed with the rest of the divine edicts on the tablets of our altars; it is read in each hallowed place of Christian worship; and is, I trust, engraven on the hearts of my hearers.

Let us revert to the original institution of this

one day in seven, which we are thus imperatively called upon to keep holy.

When God created the earth which we inhabit, he was pleased, for his own special purposes, to divide his work into the separate operation of six days. The seventh was set apart as the day of rest; and we find that "he blessed it, and sanctified it, because that in it he had rested from all his work, which God created and made." That great Being, who could have called the whole fabric of creation into instant existence, chose to illustrate to man the importance of the Sabbath, by setting him an example of its sanctity in his own person. Thus divinely instituted, it became the sacred interval of the week, the period of repose and peculiar worship, the commemoration of the Creator's stupendous work, finished, inspected, and approved. And since the fall, it has passed into a type of that eternal rest, which the righteous shall hereafter enjoy in heaven,

From this early notice of the primal institution of this consecrated day, there is no allusion to it in the inspired writings, until after the lapse of a long period of years; when

it is mentioned, in connexion with the miraculous event of the manna sent from heaven, while the Israelites were journeying through the wilderness. Then ensues the public promulgation of the Sabbath to the Jews, with much formality and imposing splendour, when the decalogue was presented to Moses, and the children of Israel received their settled code of laws.

There has been much controversy among divines on this subject; some holding, that the Sabbath was first appointed at the delivery of the law on Mount Sinai: and that when the inspired writer states, on closing his account of the creation, that God blessed the Sabbath day, and sanctified it, because he rested from his work, he only adverts to the remote reason of the recently appointed Sabbath, connecting it with the creation, not in order of time, but as the cause of its subsequent institution for commemorating the day of God's cessation from his work. The ground of this opinion is, the absence of any reference to the subject, except in that solitary verse in the second chapter of Genesis, until we read of the journey through

the wilderness of Arabia. Now this omission is quite in unison with the general conciseness of the whole composition. Much of the history of those early ages is unfolded to us; but how much more remains unrecorded! I hold that the observance of the Sabbath was a primitive edict of the Almighty, coeval with the existence of mankind, universal in the force of its obligation, honoured by our first parents, attended to even after the fall; but gradually neglected, disused, obliterated—as sin prevailed, and the empire of Satan predominated over the reign of the Lord of Hosts. I then behold its revival, when Moses was divinely called; and I infer its perpetual and unalterable claim to be kept holy by all who value the love, and fear the displeasure of Him who first hallowed it.*

But, it has been asked-admitting all this,

* That time was customarily measured by periods of seven days, may be inferred from the history of the deluge, where Noah is represented as waiting three successive intervals of that duration before he was permitted to leave the ark. There is nothing in the periods of nature, to countenance this division of time; and it is difficult to account for it if we do not allow the Sabbath to have been instituted at the creation.