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CONTENTS. 
 
 i. Introductory—2. Analogous Institutions among Heathen 
 Nations—3. The Babylonian Sabbath—4. The Week of 
 Seven Days— 5. The Sacred Number—6. The Witness to 
 the Beneficence of the Day of Rest—7. Its Service to Body 
 and Mind—8. Its Service to Society—9. Its Service to Piety 
 —10. The Witness of the Poets—11. The Unique Position 
 of the Day as an Institution of Beneficence—12. The Pre¬ 
 sumption of its Divine Claims and the Proof—13. The Orig¬ 
 inality of the Hebrew Sabbath—14. Relation of the Hebrew 
 Sabbath to the Babylonian Days of Rest—15. The Antiquity 
 of the Sabbath: the Main Arguments on the Subject—16. 
 The Antiquity of the Sabbath : Conclusions on the Subject— 
 
 17. First Mention of the Sabbath in the Books of Moses— 
 
 18. The Laws of the Manna—19. The Sabbath-Law at Sinai 
 — 20. The Terms of the Sabbath-Law in Exodus—21. The 
 Terms of the Sabbath-Law in Deuteronomy—22. The Note 
 of Beneficence in the Deuteronomic Law—23. The Idea of 
 the Sabbath in the Ten Words—24. Peculiarity of the Sab¬ 
 bath as a Mosaic Institution—25. The Sabbath and the 
 Sabbatical Cycle—26. The Sacred or Sabbatical Month— 
 27. The Sabbatical Year—28. The Jubilee Year—29. The 
 Significance of the jubilee—30. Meaning of the Sabbatical 
 Cycle—31. The Interpretation and Application of the Sabbath- 
 Law—32. Negative Regulations and Enactments: Liberty 
 of Movement—33. Negative Enactments: the Penal Law— 
 34. Negative Enactments : the Case of Fires—35. The Case 
 of the Sabbath-breaker in the Wilderness—36. Positive Enact¬ 
 ments for the Observance of the Sabbath: the Holy Convo¬ 
 cation—37. Positive Enactments: Special Offerings—38. The 
 Sabbath in the Historical Books of the Old Testament— 
 
6 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 39. The Sabbath in the Historical Books of the Old Testa¬ 
 ment : Chronicles—40. The Sabbath in the Historical Books 
 of the Old Testament: Nehemiah—41. The Sabbath in the 
 Historical Books of the Old Testament: Nehemiah—42. The 
 Sabbath in the Prophets: Amos and Hosea—43. The Sab¬ 
 bath in the Prophets : First Half of Isaiah—44. The Sabbath 
 in the Prophets: Second Half of Isaiah—45. The Sabbath 
 in the Prophets: Jeremiah and Lamentations—46. The 
 Sabbath in the Prophets : Ezekiel’s Announcements of Judg¬ 
 ment—47. The Sabbath in the Prophets : Ezekiel’s Announce¬ 
 ments of Restoration—48. The Sabbath of the Old Testament 
 —49. The Sabbath of Judaism—50. The Sabbath of the 
 Scribes — 51. The Sabbath of the New Testament: the 
 Gospels—52. Christ’s Own Attitude to the Sabbath—53. 
 Christ and the Sabbath of the Scribes—54. Christ’s Refuta¬ 
 tion of the Pharisaic Idea of the Sabbath—55. The First 
 Sabbath Miracles—56. The Sabbath Miracle at the Pool of 
 Bethesda—57. Sabbath Miracles in Galilee and Jerusalem— 
 
 58. Sabbath Healings at Places Unnamed—59. The First 
 Token of another Sacred Day—60. The Sabbath in the Book 
 of Acts—61. The Sabbath in the Epistles—62. The Sabbath 
 in the Epistles—63. The New Day of Rest—64. Sabbath 
 and Lord’s Day in Post-Apostolic Times—65. The Christian \/ 
 Obligation of the Day—66. The Christian Use of the Day. 
 
 ERR A TUM. 
 
 P . 19, /. 8, for “ the Archbishop” read “ Bishop" 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 WELFARE OF YOUTH EXAMINATIONS. 
 Candidates in the Senior Grade take the zvhole Primer. 
 
 Candidates in the Middle Grade take from § 17 (First Mention of 
 the Sabbath in the Books of Moses) to the end of the Primer. 
 Candidates in the Junior Grade take from § 1 7 to the end of the 
 Primer , omitting §§ 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 38, 39, 64. 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 i. INTRODUCTORY. —The Day of Sacred Rest 
 is a subject of great historical interest and of still 
 greater practical importance. Much has been 
 written on it, not only by theologians but by phil¬ 
 anthropists and thinkers of many different schools, 
 and various views have been taken of its authority, 
 its meaning, its antiquity, and its observance. We 
 are to study it chiefly as it appears in the Scriptures 
 of the Old and New Testaments. Both in the 
 Church of Israel and in the Christian Church such 
 a day has been recognised as an institution of divine 
 authority and gracious purpose. Among the Jews 
 of ancient time it had a position of such sanctity 
 and honour that Greek and Roman writers singled 
 it out as one of the most peculiar marks of a peculiar 
 people, and mocked them for the regard in which 
 they held it. In Christendom its claims have also 
 been reverently acknowledged and its benefits deeply 
 confessed. This has been most the case, too, with 
 the strongest Christian peoples and in the best 
 Christian times. The most devout men in all ages 
 have felt it to be a chief help to personal and 
 domestic piety, an invaluable aid to worship, a 
 protection and support of the sanctity of the home. 
 The wisest men in all generations have acknow- 
 
8 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 ledged it to be at the roots of national health, 
 stability, and progress. The adherents of the most 
 diverse creeds, and eminent men outside the Chris¬ 
 tian Church, have joined hands in pronouncing it 
 one of the most precious of all institutions, an 
 inheritance to be guarded with jealous care. 
 
 2. ANALOGOUS INSTITUTIONS AMONG THE 
 HEATHEN NATIONS.— While the Day of Rest 
 occupies a peculiar position in the Jewish and 
 Christian religions, there are things in some sense 
 analogous to it outside these. The idea of sacred 
 days has existed in various forms in other systems 
 of faith and among other nations. The name, the 
 particular day, the relation to the week, the uses to 
 which the institution has been dedicated, have 
 differed. But the need or the benefit of an ordin¬ 
 ance of this order has been widely felt, and where a 
 day of this kind has been established it has usually 
 had the two purposes of attention to religious 
 rites and cessation of ordinary work. With the 
 Druses Thursday is the sacred day. There are 
 tribes with whom Wednesday has occupied the 
 same position. The Mohammedans set apart 
 Friday as their Sabbath. The Arab tribes, long 
 before Mohammed’s time, the Phoenicians, and 
 other ancient peoples had their stated days of 
 religious observance. The Slavonians are under¬ 
 stood to have had their weekly festival. The Persians 
 are reported to have made the eighth day, and the 
 Peruvians the ninth day, a festal day or day of rest. 
 The Romans had their Saturnalia , a festival of 
 remotest antiquity, held in honour of the god 
 Saturnus, whose name remains in our word Saturday; 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 9 
 
 and, in the times of the Roman Republic, one day in 
 the month of December was specially devoted to 
 the religious observances connected with that festival. 
 The Greeks had the institution of a tenth day. The 
 Egyptians at one time celebrated the tenth day, 
 at a later period the seventh. The resemblance 
 between those days and the Sabbath is only of a 
 general kind, and in none of these instances of 
 distant analogy do we find anything distinctly the 
 same in character as the Sabbath of the Hebrews. 
 But there is another case of a very different kind. 
 That is the seventh-day ordinance which, as our 
 authorities on Assyrian and Babylonian questions 
 inform us, has in recent times been discovered to 
 have existed among the ancient Chaldeans. The 
 special interest of this lies in the fact that these 
 Chaldeans were of the same stock as the Hebrews, 
 and are known to have had traditions of the Crea¬ 
 tion, the Deluge, and other things of which we read 
 in the Hebrew Scriptures. 
 
 3 . THE BABYLONIAN SABBATH.— A list of the 
 days of one of the Babylonian months has been 
 recovered. It specifies the god or gods to whom 
 each particular day is dedicated, and the offerings 
 or ceremonies which are appointed for the occasion. 
 In this list the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty- 
 first, and the twenty-eighth days are described as 
 days of rest. They are understood to be designated 
 Sabbaths, the name being taken to be Sabattuv , 
 corresponding to the Hebrew word for the day. 
 Certain things are forbidden to be done on these 
 days. The ruler of the great nations is not to eat 
 certain meats. He is not to change his clothes or 
 
IO 
 
 THE SABBATH 
 
 put on white garments. He is not to offer sacrifice, 
 or drive in his chariot, or issue decrees. There is 
 to be no muttering of the augur, neither is medicine 
 to be used for the sickness of the body. It is inferred 
 from this that the Babylonians and Assyrians had 
 their Sabbath, and that it was observed on the 
 seventh day. It is inferred further, by some of our 
 acknowledged authorities that the institution must 
 have been of very ancient date, and must have 
 existed indeed in the days of the Accadians, an 
 extremely ancient and remarkable people who pre¬ 
 ceded the Assyrians and Babylonians, and are held 
 in honour as the fathers of astronomy and the 
 inventors of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped style of 
 writing. 
 
 4 . THE WEEK OF SEVEN DAYS.—The day of 
 rest, which the recently discovered tablets appear to 
 present as a Babylonian institution, is connected 
 with the natural division of the month into four 
 periods of seven days. The division of time into 
 weeks of seven days also existed among the ancient 
 Hebrews, and both among them and among the 
 Babylonians the number seven was a sacred number. 
 So when in Genesis ii. 3 it is said that “ God blessed 
 the seventh day and hallowed it,” the sanctity of 
 that day is “ connected with the institution of the 
 week of seven days as an entirety, and with the 
 sanctity of the number seven in general ” (Schrader). 
 This division of time is supposed to have been sug¬ 
 gested by the phases of the moon or by the number 
 of the planets known to the ancients. It is of 
 unknown antiquity in Asia and Africa. The Arabs, 
 the Persians, and other Eastern peoples were ac- 
 
THE SABBATH 
 
 ii 
 
 quainted with it. It existed in early times among 
 some of the races in the African continent. But it 
 was not universal. Nations like the Egyptians and 
 the Greeks had a week of ten days. The Romans did 
 not introduce the week of seven days till the fourth 
 century of the Christian era. It was not known 
 among the pre-Christian Americans. The Mexicans 
 seem to have had a week of five days. But the 
 Babylonians and the Hebrews both had the week of 
 seven days, and observed the seventh day as a day 
 of rest. That the septenary division of time was 
 known to the Hebrews long before the age of Moses 
 is inferred from various things which appear in the 
 book of Genesis. The naming of the eighth day as 
 that on which every man child of the Hebrews was 
 to be circumcised under the covenant with Abraham 
 (xvii. 12, xxi. 4) ; the notice of the week in the 
 story of Jacob (xxix. 27) ; and the mention of the 
 period of seven days four times over in the narrative 
 of the Flood (vii. 4, 10, viii. 10, 12), are the passages 
 specially referred to as implying this. And it is the 
 opinion of our best inquirers that the week of seven 
 days was an ancient Chaldean institution, and that 
 the Hebrews brought it with them when they left 
 Ur of the Chaldees, the South Babylonian town 
 from which Abraham, the father of the Hebrew 
 people, migrated. 
 
 5. THE SACRED NUMBER. — In connection 
 with this septenary division of time which lies at the 
 basis of the institution of the Sabbath, it is also to 
 be observed that a peculiar sacredness and signifi¬ 
 cance belonged to the number seven. This was the 
 case, not only with the Hebrews and the Baby- 
 
12 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 lonians, but with other ancient nations, the Indians, 
 the Persians (cf. Esther i. 5, 10, 14), the Chinese, 
 and to some extent the Greeks and Romans. But 
 it was peculiarly so with the Hebrews. With them 
 it was the chief symbolical number, surpassing in 
 this respect the twelve, the twenty-four, and all other 
 numbers to which such a significance was attached. 
 With them, too, the seventh had a sacredness 
 beyond even that given to the seven. So the Old 
 Testament begins with the narrative of the Creation 
 of the world in six days and the Rest of God on the 
 seventh, and our English New Testament closes 
 with a book, that of the Revelation of St John, 
 which has seven for its constantly recurring number, 
 and gives in a series of sevens intimations of events 
 and truths of weightiest moment. The seven and 
 the seventh in the Scriptures are thus the repre¬ 
 sentatives of great ideas, completeness , perfection , 
 sanctity , and the like. Among other ideas they 
 appear specially to betoken those of religious dura¬ 
 tion and religious periodicity or recurrence. Seven 
 days, for example, were the appointed length of the 
 great Festivals—the passover (Exod. xii. 15), and 
 the feast of tabernacles (Deut. xvi. 13). So, too, 
 the seventh year was a “ sabbath of rest unto the 
 land ” (Lev. xxv. 4); the Jubilee was after seven 
 times seven years (Lev. xxv. 8-11); the great day 
 of atonement was in the seventh month (Lev. xvi. 
 2 9> 3°) 5 Pentecost, or the feast of weeks, was seven 
 weeks after passover (Lev. xxiii. 15,16). In like man¬ 
 ner, the arrangements of the tabernacle, the offerings, 
 the prescriptions on the subject of wrongs, and other 
 things of the Law, were largely in sevens—the seven 
 
THE SABBATH 
 
 13 
 
 parts of the candlestick and the seven lamps (Exod. 
 xxv. 31-37) ; the seven times that the blood of the 
 sacrificial victim was to be sprinkled (Lev. iv. 6, 
 xvi. 14) ; the seven sprinklings of the water of 
 purification (Lev. xiv. 51); the seven things named 
 for offering in sacrifice (oxen, sheep, goats, pigeons, 
 wheat, oil, wine) ; the seven victims for special 
 occasions (Num. xxiii. 1, 14, 29) ; the seven times 
 declared for the punishment of sins (Lev. xxvi. 18). 
 
 6. THE WITNESS TO THE BENEFICENCE 
 OF THE DAY OF REST. —The history of opinion 
 shows that, as in the case of other religious institu¬ 
 tions, so in that of the Day of Rest, even those who 
 have been at one in honouring it have not thought 
 alike on everything connected with it. Various 
 questions touching its foundation and its observance 
 have been matters of dispute, and still continue to 
 receive different answers from different Churches, 
 and from reverent thinkers of different mental habits. 
 But these variations in opinion are of small moment 
 in comparison with the unity of the testimony to 
 the inestimable value of the Day. Men who stand 
 far apart in the ideas which they have been led to 
 form on certain points of great interest relating to 
 its origin, its history, and its claims, speak with one 
 voice of this institution as “ the suggestion of infinite 
 beneficence.” Those who have thought most pro¬ 
 foundly on the secret of the welfare of communities, 
 those who have been best entitled to speak from 
 experience of different professions and ways of life, 
 and those who have walked most closely with God, 
 have borne harmonious witness to the need for 
 such a Day, and to the good which it brings to the 
 
14 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 weak and burdened life of humanity. The poets of 
 our own land and of other climes, the men to whom 
 God has given the gift of seeing deeper into the 
 nature of things than all others, have had visions of 
 its grace, and have celebrated its praises. Thinkers 
 of regal intellect have done homage to its sacred 
 claims. Divines like Richard Hooker, one of the 
 chief ornaments of the Church of England, have 
 owned that “ we are to account the sanctification of 
 one day in seven a duty which God’s immutable law 
 doth exact for ever.” Sages like Lord Bacon, the 
 father of modern science, have confessed that “ God 
 demands and segregates for Himself a tenth of our 
 substance, but a seventh of cur time.” Men of 
 authority in the ancient heathen world, like the 
 Emperor Julian, were so affected by what they saw 
 of its action as to think of introducing something 
 -e>f its kind into pagan society. The experience of 
 the ages is on its side, the voice of civilised 
 humanity attests its benefits. It may prepare us for 
 a sympathetic study of this great institution, if we 
 begin by recalling some of those remarkable testi¬ 
 monies to its worth which have been offered, in 
 older times or in more recent, by men who have 
 taken the foremost places in their several orders of 
 life and usefulness, and who have looked at it from 
 different points of view. 
 
 7. ITS SERVICE TO BODY AND MIND.—The 
 
 refreshment provided for our physical and mental 
 being by the institution of the Day of Rest is 
 attested by acknowledged authorities in medical 
 science. Among distinguished physiologists, Dr 
 Carpenter, to take one well-known instance, declares 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 15 
 
 that the testimony of his “ own experience is very 
 strong to the importance of the complete rest and 
 change of thought once in the week.” Dr Farre, 
 in his evidence before a Committee of the House of 
 Commons, expresses himself thus : “ Although the 
 night apparently equalises the circulation well, 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 repose the animal 
 system. Physiologically considered, power saved 
 is power gained, and the waste of power from every 
 kind of excitement defeats the purposes of the day. 
 
 . . . This is said simply as a physician, and without 
 reference to the theological question; but if you 
 consider further the proper effect of real Christianity, 
 namely, peace of mind, confiding trust in God, and 
 goodwill to man, you will perceive in this source of 
 renewed vigour to the mind, and through the mind 
 to the body, an additional spring of life imparted 
 from this higher use of the Sabbath as a holy rest.” 
 Others of like distinction in medical science speak 
 in similar terms of the physical and intellectual 
 benefits of the Day of Rest. Their witness is con¬ 
 firmed by men of eminence in art and letters, and 
 by other toilers of the brain. The great painter, Sir 
 David Wilkie, prints of whose pictures adorn many 
 a Scottish home, gave it as his experience that 
 “ those artists who wrought on Sunday were soon 
 disqualified from working at all.” Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge, philosopher and poet, to whom we owe The 
 Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Christ abet, tells 
 ns that he felt “ as if God had, by giving the Sabbath, 
 
i6 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 given fifty-two springs in the year.” Isaac Taylor, the 
 distinguished essayist, declared himself prepared to 
 affirm that, to the studious especially, and whether 
 youngei or older, a Sabbath well spent—spent in 
 happy exercises of the heart, devotional and domes¬ 
 tic—a Sunday given to the soul—is the best of 
 all means of refreshment to the mere intellect.” 
 And these aie but a few out of many such tributes. 
 
 8 . ITS SERVICE TO SOCIETY. —Its salutary 
 influence on the moial health of communities, and 
 the ministry which in various ways it renders to the 
 prosperity of States, are acknowledged by many of 
 those who are admittedly best qualified to speak. 
 There are few names to match that of Adam Smith 
 in Political Economy, and few better known in Law 
 than that of Blackstone. It was the verdict of the 
 formei that the Saboath, as a political institution, 
 is of inestimable value, independently of its claim to 
 divine authority.” It was the judgment of the latter 
 that “ a corruption of morals usually follows the pro¬ 
 fanation of the Sabbath.” Its economic advantage 
 is widely recognised. Many of the great employers 
 of labour give it as their experience that more work 
 and better is produced under a system which pre¬ 
 serves the weekly rest than under one which provides 
 for toil all the seven days. William Wilberforce, 
 whose name is so honourably connected with the 
 story of the Abolition of Slavery in the British 
 dominions, leaves it on record that when it was 
 proposed, on the occasion of a certain war, to “ work 
 all Sunday in one of the royal manufactories, for a 
 continuance, not for an occasional service, it was 
 found that the workmen who obtained Govern- 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 17 
 
 ment consent to abstain from working - on Sundays 
 executed in a few months even more work than the 
 others. None are more emphatic in their affirma¬ 
 tions of these benefits of the day than our greatest 
 statesmen. The late John Bright, for example, ex¬ 
 pressed it as his conviction that “ the stability and 
 character of our country, and the advancement of 
 our race, depend . . . very largely upon the mode in 
 which the Day of Rest, which seems to have been 
 specially adapted to the needs of mankind, shall be 
 used and observed.” Another, who has been at the 
 head of several Governments, has repeatedly spoken 
 of the observance of this Day as a “ main prop of 
 the religious character of the country,” and as, “from 
 a moral, social, and physical point of view, a duty 
 of absolute consequence.” And Lord Macaulay, 
 great as a statesman and greater as a man of 
 letters, once and again expended his rich eloquence 
 on the defence of the Day. “ The natural differ¬ 
 ence,” he said, “between Campania and Spitzbergen 
 is trifling when compared with the difference 
 between a country inhabited by men full of bodily 
 and mental vigour and a country inhabited by men 
 sunk in bodily and mental decrepitude. Therefore 
 it is that we are not poorer but richer, because we 
 have through many ages rested from our labour one 
 day in seven. That day is not lost. While industry 
 is suspended, while the plough lies in the furrow, 
 while the Exchange is silent, while no smoke 
 ascends from the factory, a process is going on 
 quite as important to the wealth of the nation as any 
 process which is performed on more busy days. 
 Man. the machine of machines, is repairing and 
 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 winding up, so that he returns to his labours on 
 Monday with clearer intellect, with livelier spirits, 
 with renewed corporeal vigour.” And again he 
 declared himself in these clear terms : “If the 
 Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest, but 
 the axe, the spade, the anvil, and the loom had 
 been at work every day during the last three 
 centuries, I have not the smallest doubt that we 
 should have been at this moment a poorer people 
 and a less civilised people than we are.” 
 
 9. ITS SERVICE TO PIETY.— The devoutestmen 
 in all ages, and in every variety of circumstance and 
 occupation, have borne witness to the need of the 
 Day of Rest for the preservation and elevation of 
 the religious life, have spoken of their own delight 
 in it, and have owned their indebtedness to its 
 gracious influences and precious opportunities. The 
 testimony given to his children by Sir Matthew 
 Hale, one of the most upright and distinguished 
 judges of an older time, well known as it is, is in 
 place here : “ I have, by long and sound experience,” 
 he says, “found that the due observance of the 
 Sabbath and of the duties of it has been of singular 
 comfort and advantage to me ; the observance of this 
 Day hath ever joined to it a blessing on the rest of 
 my time.” Tyndale, the man who expatriated him¬ 
 self in order to provide the English people with a 
 translation of the New Testament into their own 
 tongue, and who died, a victim of assassination, with 
 the prayer, “Lord, open the eyes of the King of 
 England,” on his lips, made it his custom (as John 
 Fox tells us), when living in Antwerp in the ex¬ 
 ecution of his great work, to go on the Sunday to 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 19 
 
 “some one merchant’s chamber or other, whither 
 came many other merchants, and unto them would be 
 read some one parcel of Scripture; the which pro¬ 
 ceeded so fruitfully, sweetly, and gently from him, 
 much like to the writing of John the Evangelist, that 
 it was a heavenly comfort and joy to the audience 
 to hear him read the Scriptures.” Robert Leighton, 
 the Archbishop of Dunblane who bore the white 
 flower of a saintly life in Scotland’s troubled times, 
 speaks of the “ very life of religion ” as depending 
 on the observance of this day. “Consider but if 
 we should intermit the keeping of it for one year,” 
 he says, “ to what a height profaneness would rise 
 in those that fear not God ; which are yet restrained 
 (though not converted) by the preaching of the 
 Word and their outward partaking of public worship; 
 yea, those that are most spiritual would find them¬ 
 selves losers by the intermission.” Not less clearly 
 were its benefits recognised by the great German 
 Reformer. “ It is good, and even necessary,” wrote 
 Martin Luther, “ that men should keep a particular 
 day in the week, on which they are to meditate, 
 hear, and learn, for all cannot command every day; 
 and nature also requires that one day in the week 
 should be kept quiet, without labour either for man 
 or beast.” What it has been to Christian men who 
 have gone out to occupy the posts of difficulty in 
 heathen lands is seen from what is recorded of 
 Henry Martyn’s joy in it, and his grateful, scrupulous 
 use of it, and from the glimpses we get of the life of 
 the noble Eliot, “ the Apostle of the Indians.” Of the 
 latter it is stated that “he knew that our whole religion 
 fares according to our Sabbaths; that poor Sabbaths 
 
20 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 make poor Christians; and that a strictness in our 
 Sabbaths inspires a vigour into all our other 
 duties.” For this reason he brought his Indians to 
 “ bind themselves, as a principal means of confirm¬ 
 ing them in Christianity, ‘To remember the Sabbath- 
 day to keep it holy, as long as we live. 5 ” And 
 among a mass of similar testimonies which it would 
 be easy to cite, one of a remarkable kind comes 
 from the philosopher John Locke. “Besides his 
 particular calling for the support of life,” it runs, 
 “every one has a concern in a future life, which he 
 is bound to look after. This engages his thoughts 
 in religion ; and here it mightily lies upcn him to 
 understand and reason aright. Men, therefore, 
 cannot be excused from understanding and framing 
 the general notions relating to religious right. The 
 one day in seven, besides other days of rest, allows 
 in the Christian world time enough for this (had 
 they no other idle hours), if they would but make 
 use of these vacancies from their daily labour, and 
 apply themselves to an improvement of knowledge 
 with as much diligence as they often do to a great 
 many other things that are useless.” 
 
 io. THE WITNESS OF THE POETS.— Any 
 notice of the testimony which has been borne by so 
 many different classes to the debt of the individual 
 and the debt of society to this sacred institution 
 would be incomplete without some reference to the 
 estimate formed of it by those elect interpreters -of 
 the spiritual meaning of life and nature and ordin¬ 
 ance, the poets. The place which the Day has in the 
 hymns of the Christian Church needs no mention. 
 Words of sweet suggestion and grateful melody, 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 21 
 
 which are consecrated to its praise in many a familiar 
 sacred song, will at once occur to mind. But the 
 opulent stream of English poetry, apart from the 
 rich hymnology of the land, has brought us many 
 a gracious tribute to the Sabbath or the Lord’s Day. 
 Edmund Spenser, to whose superb imagination we 
 owe the Faerie Queen , Mrs Browning, James 
 Grahame, Hartley Coleridge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
 John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Vaughan, George 
 Herbert, James D. Burns, and many more are 
 among the poets of the Day of Rest. Some words 
 from the three last-mentioned will find a fitting 
 place here. Henry Vaughan, “the Silurist,” the 
 Welsh mystic of the seventeenth century, is best 
 known to us perhaps by the pathetic stanzas on 
 departed friends— 
 
 “ They are all gone into the world of light 
 And I alone sit lingering here.” 
 
 But he says no less charmingly of the Sundays 
 of his life— 
 
 “ Bright shadows of true rest! some shoots of bliss ; 
 
 Heaven once a week ; 
 
 The next world’s gladness prepossest in this ; 
 
 A day to seek 
 
 Eternity in time ; the steps by which 
 We climb above all ages ; lamps that light 
 Man through his heap of dark-days ; and the rich 
 And full redemption of the whole week’s flight. 
 
 In kindred strains George Herbert, the saintly 
 rector of Bemerton, celebrated the day which had 
 brought him gladness, and sang his tender Sunday 
 poem to his lute when near his end— 
 
22 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 “ O Day most calm, most bright, 
 
 The fruit of this, the next world’s bud, 
 
 The indorsement of supreme delight, 
 
 Writ by a Friend, and with His blood ; 
 
 The couch of time, care’s balm and bay ! 
 
 The weeks were dark but for thy light! 
 
 Thy torch doth show the way ! ” 
 
 And in terms to match any for choice expression 
 and chastened sentiment, James Drummond Burns, 
 a singer less widely known than those others, ex¬ 
 pressed what the evening of the Lord’s Day had 
 been to him— 
 
 •'* O time of tranquil joy and holy feeling ! 
 
 When over earth God’s Spirit from above 
 Spreads out His wings of love ! 
 
 When sacred thoughts, like angels, come appealing 
 To our tent doors ; O eve, to earth and heaven 
 The sweetest of the seven,” 
 
 ii. THE UNIQUE POSITION OF THE DAY 
 AS AN INSTITUTION OF BENEFICENCE.— 
 
 The peculiarity of this Day among historical institu¬ 
 tions ; the purpose impressed on it, so unlike the 
 promptings of common human selfishness ; the ex¬ 
 perience of its gracious influence on the moral 
 and religious life of man, on the good of society, 
 and on the strength and prosperity of states, speak 
 to its peculiar claims. These broad facts point 
 to a higher origin for it than the operation of 
 political sagacity or common religious sentiment. 
 They raise at least a presumption in favour of this 
 prior to inquiry. They have been accepted indeed 
 by many as bespeaking for it a foundation in the 
 Divine Will and a permanent place in man’s life. 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 23 
 
 “ The divine origin of the Sabbath,” says Dr Croly, 
 
 “ might almost be proved from its opposition to the 
 lower propensities of mankind. In no age of the 
 world, since labour was known, would any master 
 of the serf, the slave, or the cattle, have spon¬ 
 taneously given up a seventh part of their toil. No 
 human legislator would have proposed such a law 
 of property, or, if he had, no nation would have 
 endured it. . . . The Sabbath in its whole character is 
 so strongly opposed to the avarice, the heartlessness, 
 and the irreligion of man that, except in the days of 
 Moses and Joshua, it has probably never been 
 observed with due reverence by any nation of the 
 world.” And Dr Thomas Chalmers, taking up 
 another branch of the same broad argument from 
 experience, puts this aspect of the question thus : 
 “ For the permanency of the Sabbath, we might argue 
 its place in the Decalogue, where it stands enshrined 
 among the moralities of a rectitude that is immut¬ 
 able and everlasting ; and we might argue the 
 traditional homage and observancy in which it has 
 been held since the days of the Apostles ; and we 
 might argue the undoubted and experimental fact 
 that, where this day is best kept, there all the other 
 graces of Christianity are in most healthful exercise 
 and preservation. But we rather waive, for the 
 present, all these considerations ; and would rest 
 the perpetuity of the Sabbath law on the affirma¬ 
 tion that, while a day of unmeaning drudgery to 
 the formalist, it is to every real Christian a day of 
 holy and heavenly delight—that he loves the law 
 and so has it graven on the tablet of his heart, with 
 a power of sovereignty over his actions which it 
 
24 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 never had when it was only engraven on a tablet of 
 stone, or on the tablet of an outward revelation— 
 that, wherever there is a true principle of religion, 
 the consecration of the Sabbath is felt, not as a 
 bondage, but is felt to be the very beatitude of the 
 soul ; and that, therefore, the keeping of it, instead 
 of being viewed as a slavish exaction on the time 
 and services of the outer man, is the direct and 
 genuine fruit of a spiritual impulse on the best 
 affections of the inner man.” 
 
 12. THE PRESUMPTION OF ITS DIVINE 
 CLAIMS AND THE PROOF. —An institution to 
 the beneficent purpose and operation of which so 
 great a cloud of witnesses, gathered from quarters 
 so diverse, bear eloquent testimony, has peculiar 
 demands upon our regard, and suggests for itself a 
 higher than human authority. Its proved adapta¬ 
 tion to the preservation and promotion of the 
 moral life of society and the religious life of the 
 individual, establishes a presumption in favour of 
 its divine claims. But this presumption has to 
 be tested by the history of the institution. We 
 shall study it, therefore, as it comes before us in 
 the records of the Old and New Testaments, with 
 the view of ascertaining its foundation, its authority, 
 its distinctive character, and the method of its 
 observance. It is necessary also to look beyond 
 these records and examine others of different 
 kinds. We shall have to look into the literature of 
 other ancient nations, into the Jewish books which 
 were in circulation between the close of Old Testa¬ 
 ment prophecy and the beginning of the Christian 
 era, and into the writings of Christian authors who 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 25 
 
 flourished in the centuries immediately succeeding 
 the close of the New Testament Canon. The first 
 of these three kinds of literature will show us what 
 other nations had in the form of institutions in any 
 measure resembling the Sabbath. The second will 
 help us to understand how the original Mosaic 
 Sabbath was disastrously changed before our Lord’s 
 Advent, and made a heavy and intolerable yoke by 
 the Rabbis. The third will enable us to follow the 
 course by which the institution passed from the 
 seventh day to the first. 
 
 13. THE ORIGINALITY OF THE HEBREW 
 SABBATH.— Whatever may bethought to resemble 
 it in the institutions of other nations, the Sabbath, 
 as it existed in Israel, had a character and a position 
 entirely its own. It has been held by some to have 
 been a derived institution. Even were that made 
 out to be the case, its distinctive nature and claims 
 would not necessarily be affected. Other things 
 which are known to us as of sacred meaning and 
 divine authority in Israel existed in certain forms 
 elsewhere, and were taken over and clothed with a 
 special sacredness and significance in the religion 
 of Israel and in the service of the God of Revela¬ 
 tion. Circumcision, for example, was not a prac¬ 
 tice confined to the chosen people, although with 
 them it was made a rite with a peculiar meaning, 
 a sign of the covenant-relation between God and 
 Israel, the token of entrance into the community 
 of the living God. But in the case of the Sabbath 
 of the Old Testament, the proof of its derived 
 nature fails. It has been asserted, for instance, 
 that it was borrowed from the Egyptians. But 
 
2 6 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 that is disproved by the fact that in the ancient 
 period of Egyptian history the week was one of ten 
 days, not of seven. The Roman historian Tacitus, 
 again, in speaking of the rest of the seventh day 
 among the Jews, mentions that some said it was 
 adopted because that day “ brought with it a termi¬ 
 nation of their toilsbut that others explained it to 
 be “an observance in honour of Saturn,” one possible 
 reason for which was “ the circumstance that of the 
 seven stars which rule the destinies of men, Saturn 
 moves in the highest orbit and with the mightiest 
 power, and that many of the heavenly bodies com¬ 
 plete their revolutions and courses in multiples of 
 seven.” Some have followed the account of it thus 
 noticed by Tacitus, giving it an astrological meaning 
 and supposing that it was connected originally with 
 the worship of the deity Saturnus,to whom the ancient 
 Latin people ascribed the introduction of agriculture 
 and the arts of civilised life, and in whose honour 
 a great annual festival was held, during which busi¬ 
 ness was suspended and the schools and law-courts 
 closed. But this is inconsistent with what we know 
 both of Saturn’s festival and of the Sabbath. The two 
 things were essentially different, the former being 
 rather a Harvest-home, celebrating the completion 
 of the agricultural labour of the year, and devoted 
 to merriment and forms of amusement resembling 
 those indulged in at the Carnival season in Rome. 
 Further, the ancient Hebrews are not known to have 
 distinguished the days of the week by assigning them 
 to the several planets and naming them after these. 
 There is nothing in the Old Testament to show 
 that the Hebrew Sabbath had any astrological 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 2 7 
 
 meaning. The days of the week are never named 
 after the planets in the Hebrew Scriptures, as they 
 are in part even in our own calendar. As far as 
 we know, the days of the ancient Hebrew week 
 were designated by numbers, the first day, the 
 second day, and so forth. 
 
 14. RELATION OF THE HEBREW SABBATH 
 TO THE BABYLONIAN DAYS OF REST. — It has 
 also been asserted that the Hebrew Sabbath was 
 borrowed from the Babylonians. But the re¬ 
 semblances which we have noticed between the 
 Babylonian practice and the Hebrew do not lead 
 us to this conclusion. Differences remain which 
 mark out the Hebrew Sabbath as a distinct 
 and independent institution. For, in the first 
 place, the 19th day of the Babylonian month re¬ 
 ferred to in the list mentioned above was also a 
 day of rest, subject to the same prescriptions as the 
 7th, 14th, 21 st, and 28th. In the second place, the 
 Babylonian week and seventh day had astrological 
 connections which are strange to the Hebrew. In 
 the third place, the Hebrew Sabbath was appointed 
 to be observed on the last day of a cycle of seven 
 which was not dependent on the changes of the 
 moon and did not vary. And further, the character 
 of the day was entirely different in the two cases. 
 It is the opinion, indeed, of some who are entitled to 
 be heard on such a question, that the Babylonian 
 day is described as “ a day of rest for the heart,” 
 and is thus in affinity with the Sabbath of the Old 
 Testament, which had the note of gladness. But 
 this is doubtful, and the conclusion most approved 
 is rather that the Babylonian seventh day, like the 
 
28 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 Roman day of Saturn, was an unfavourable or black 
 day, on which it was not possible even to offer 
 sacrifices. In which case if differs essentially from 
 the Hebrew institution. 
 
 15. THE ANTIQUITY OF THE SABBATH: 
 THE MAIN ARGUMENTS UN THE SUBJECT. 
 
 —The Sabbath as it appears in the Old Testament, 
 therefore, is an institution of an order and an origin 
 entirely its own. It is one firmly planted in the 
 history of the chosen people, in all ages one of 
 their most distinctive possessions, deeply rooted 
 in their religious life, and contributing largely to 
 make them what they have been. The question is 
 how ancient it is. It is clear from the Old Testa¬ 
 ment that it is a Mosaic institution, as ancient at 
 least as the Law. But it is asked whether it is pre- 
 Mosaic ; and if so, how far back it can be traced ; 
 whether to patriarchal or even to primeval times. 
 This is one of the questions relating to the Sabbath 
 on which opinion has been most divided. That it 
 existed, as distinct and unique, before Moses, has 
 been inferred from the terms of the Fourth Com¬ 
 mandment, “ Remember the Sabbath-day,” which 
 have been taken to indicate not the introduction of a 
 new observance, but the recollection and recalled 
 regard of an old one. But it is pointed out that the 
 word “ Remember ” does not necessarily mean more 
 than be mindful of it, have a respect for it, or give 
 heed to it. In favour of its existence in the patri¬ 
 archal age it is argued that it is connected with the 
 division of time into weeks of seven days ; that this 
 division of time is of most ancient date and wide¬ 
 spread extent; that it is shown to have been known 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 29 
 
 to the patriarchs by the references which we have 
 already noticed, namely, the “seven days” which 
 N oah “ stayed ” before he sent forth the dove (Gen. 
 viii. 10, 11), the “week” in the case of Jacob and 
 Laban (Gen. xxix. 27, 28), and similar notes of time ; 
 and that it is difficult to account for its extreme 
 antiquity and its diffusion among peoples so numer¬ 
 ous and so far separated from each other, except by 
 the supposition of a Divine Revelation of it. To 
 this, however, it is replied that the week of seven 
 days, though wide-spread, was far from universal. 
 The Greeks, for example, divided their months into 
 decades ; the Romans had more than one division 
 of time, into Kalends, Nones, Ides, and also into 
 Nundines or market periods of nine days ; and other 
 peoples had weeks of five or ten days. It is urged, 
 further, that there is no necessary connection be¬ 
 tween the week of seven days and the Sabbath, as 
 is proved by the fact that the one has existed with¬ 
 out the other. The Ashantees in Africa, the Druses, 
 and others, have had the week of seven days without 
 regarding the seventh as their sacred day. In 
 support of the primeval origin of the Day, the appeal 
 is made to the statement in the record of Creation 
 that “God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it” 
 (Gen. ii. 3). But to this, again, it is replied,—as for 
 example by Paley,—that the words do not neces¬ 
 sarily mean that the seventh day was blessed and 
 sanctified then , but that this was the reason why 
 it came to be sanctified in Israel, and that “ 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 commemorate.” 
 
30 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 16. THE ANTIQUITY OF THE SABBATH: 
 CONCLUSIONS ON THE SUBJECT.— The argu¬ 
 ments which have been briefly stated, though they 
 do not cover all that is involved in the question, 
 are sufficient to show how the case stands. Names 
 of great authority are among those who affirm the 
 Mosaic origin of the Sabbath, and deny that there is 
 any historical trace of it farther back. Names of 
 great authority, particularly of older date, and among 
 others Lord Bacon, are among those who affirm its 
 primeval origin. The fact that it is promulgated in 
 the Decalogue does not necessarily imply that it 
 did not exist in any form before that. The mention 
 made of it in connection with the giving of the 
 manna in a chapter (Exod. xvi.) which we shall im¬ 
 mediately consider, though not entirely conclusive, 
 is understood by some of our best scholars to indi¬ 
 cate that the idea of a Sabbath was not altogether 
 strange to the Israelites of that time. The words 
 of benediction pronounced on the seventh day in 
 the record of God’s creative work (Gen. ii. 3), may 
 certainly mean that in the writer’s view the bless¬ 
 ing was then put upon the day which he knew to 
 attach to it when he wrote. And the circumstance 
 that it was solemnly instituted as one of the great 
 ordinances of the Mosaic economy, with a dis¬ 
 tinctive significance and a special order of ob¬ 
 servance, does not necessarily imply that this 
 was absolutely its first appearance, and that the 
 Day of Rest was unknown in any form previous 
 to that date. The answer which is given to this 
 question by the Westminster Confession of Faith 
 is, that the Sabbath is a primeval ordinance. 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 31 
 
 Its doctrine is that it is a Divine institution, 
 resting on a Divine Law, rooted in the con¬ 
 stitution of man, enacted by the Creator at the 
 beginning and re-enacted through Moses. Its words 
 are these : “ As it is of the law of nature, that, in 
 general, a due proportion of time be set apart for 
 the worship of God ; so, in His Word, by a positive, 
 moral, and perpetual commandment, binding all 
 men in all ages, He hath particularly appointed one 
 day in seven for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto 
 Him; which, from the beginning of the world to 
 the resurrection of Christ was the last day of the 
 week; and from the resurrection of Christ, was 
 changed into the first day of the week; which in 
 Scripture is called the Lord’s Day, and is to be 
 continued to the end of the world as the Christian 
 Sabbath.” This has been the Confessional doctrine 
 of the great Presbyterian Churches in England, 
 Scotland, and America. It was the doctrine of the 
 learned Puritan divines who wrote in the reigns of 
 Elizabeth and the Stuart kings. It was also the 
 view of not a few of the leading theologians of the 
 English Church, including Bishops Hooper, Horsley, 
 Beveridge, Burnett, and others. 
 
 17. FIRST MENTION OF THE SABBATH IN 
 THE BOOKS OF MOSES (Exodus xvi. 1-14).— 
 Passing from the question of the antiquity of the 
 Day of Rest, we shall study the Sabbath as an 
 institution of the Law and trace its history as it can 
 be gathered first from the Old Testament itself. 
 Some of the ancient Jewish Rabbis were of opinion 
 that it first appears in connection with the incident 
 at Marah. They supposed that the statute and 
 
32 
 
 THE SABBA TH. 
 
 ordinance which are said to have been made on 
 the occasion of the healing of the bitter waters were 
 the law of the Sabbath. But the ‘ statute and ordin¬ 
 ance ’ mentioned in Exodus xv. 25 are explained by 
 the words of promise, conditional on obedience, 
 which follow in verse 26 ; and the meaning of the 
 whole statement is that the events of Marah were 
 made the occasion of instructing the people in their 
 relation to their God, and in the privileges and 
 responsibilities which that relation carried with it. 
 The first mention of the Sabbath by name is in 
 the next chapter, in connection with the gift of 
 manna. The Israelites had made their way from 
 Elim into the wilderness of Sin. Worn out by 
 the fatigues of the march, the means of sub¬ 
 sistence failing them, and famine seeming to be 
 their terrible fate in this burnt waste, the whole 
 congregation broke out into murmurings. They cried 
 out against Moses and Aaron, wishing that they had 
 died in Egypt where, slaves though they were, they 
 sat by the flesh-pots and ate bread to the full, rather 
 than perish of starvation in this hungry desolation. 
 The Divine word came to Moses, and by him was 
 communicated to the faithless people, giving assur¬ 
 ance of sufficient provision. But the promised sup¬ 
 port was to come in a way to try their trust and 
 dependence. It was to be given day by day, a day’s 
 portion at a time, and nothing more, except that on 
 the sixth day it was to be doubled. It was to be 
 flesh in the evening and bread in the morning. At 
 even they were to know that it was the Lord who 
 had brought them out of Egypt, and at morn they 
 were to see His glory. The word was quickly made 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 33 
 
 good. Summoned by Aaron in the morning, the 
 whole congregation looked to the dismal wilder¬ 
 ness in which they had feared to perish, and out of 
 the cloud flashed the storm-glory which gave token 
 of the Lord’s presence. In the evening the promised 
 flesh came in the form of quails covering the camp. 
 Travellers tell us of these birds, how they pass over 
 those parts in dense masses in the course of their 
 autumn and spring migrations to and from Africa; 
 how they fly near the ground, birds of earth rather 
 than of air, as an old Roman writer calls them ; and 
 how easy it is to catch and kill them in their resting 
 moments, or as they fly low and heavy when the 
 weariness of the journey tells on them. In the morn¬ 
 ing, too, the promised bread came in the form of the 
 manna, a small round white thing, compared to 
 coriander seed, which lay like hoar-frost on the 
 ground when the dew rose—something resembling 
 in certain respects the sugary gum of the tamarisk 
 tree which the Arabs have called manna, but de¬ 
 scribed here in terms which are not quite appropriate 
 either to that or to the manna of commerce now 
 brought to us from Sicily. 
 
 18. THE LAWS OF THE MANNA (Exodus xvi. 
 15-3°).—This new provision, the “angels’ food” of 
 the Psalm (lxxviii. 25), the “bread from heaven,” of 
 which both Nehemiah (ix. 15) and our Lord Himself 
 spoke (J ohn vi. 32), the figure of the grace of life 
 which is to be the reward of “him that overcometh” 
 (Rev. ii. 17), was to be subject to certain regulations 
 designed to recall great spiritual truths and duties 
 which the people were prone to forget. These regu¬ 
 lations were solemnly published to the wondering 
 
34 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 congregation by their great leader. The Israelite 
 was to gather his portion day by day in sufficient 
 measure for himself and his house, and nothing 
 beyond that. If more was gathered and kept be¬ 
 yond its day, it was found corrupt in the morning. 
 On each of the first six days of the week it was thus 
 to be gathered, but not on the seventh. Instead of 
 being found on the field on the last day of the 
 week, it was to be provided and gathered in double 
 measure on the sixth day. One half of this twofold 
 supply was to be kept and prepared against the 
 Seventh day, so that on that day it did not become 
 corrupt. When the double quantity came to the 
 people’s hand on the sixth day, the rulers of the con¬ 
 gregation reported the fact to Moses, and the ex¬ 
 planation was then given. The leader of Israel 
 recognised and proclaimed the fact that it was the 
 Divine purpose that the seventh day should be “ a 
 solemn rest, a holy sabbath unto the Lord” (R.V.). 
 It is added that certain Israelites, disregarding the 
 word of Moses on the appointment of the seventh 
 day as a Sabbath to the Lord, or failing to under¬ 
 stand it, went forth to gather on that day as on other 
 days. But they failed to find the manna. That event 
 occasioned the repetition of the law in the more 
 definite form, that every man was to “ abide in his 
 place,” and none to go out of the camp on that sacred 
 day. The people understood, and gave heed, and 
 “rested on the seventh day.” So they were prepared 
 for the solemn promulgation of the Sabbath law 
 from Sinai. This narrative has been understood 
 by many to imply that the seventh day was already 
 known as a day separated from the other days of the 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 35 
 
 week, and dedicated to rest. The opposite conclu¬ 
 sion is drawn by others from the surprise which 
 the rulers are thought to indicate in their report to 
 Moses of the double supply on the Sabbath day. In 
 any case this event prepared the people for the 
 place which was to be given to the seventh day in 
 the Decalogue, and for the subsequent laws which 
 were to protect it and regulate its observance. 
 
 19. THE SABBATH-LAW AT SINAI (Exodus 
 xx.).—Leaving Rephidim, the “threshold of Sinai,” 
 the scene of their first victory, the place where they 
 tarried long, the Hebrew host, under the sense of 
 Divine guidance and in mysterious expectation, had 
 resumed their march. Through deep valley and 
 stupendous pass they had penetrated into a territory 
 familiar to their great leader by his stay with Jethro. 
 At last they stood in the sanctuary of the desert, fit 
 scene for a revelation of God, with the heights of 
 Sinai, “the Mount of God,” on the south, and the 
 rocky wall of Horeb on the north. Here, in the heart 
 of the mighty mountains, on the memorable plain 
 which the traveller describes as “large enough to 
 give ample space for the tents of more than two 
 million souls,” these Hebrews, whose history had 
 been so strange and was to become still stranger as 
 the centuries wore on, came into a new covenant 
 with the God of their redemption. For three days 
 solemn preparation was made, the people waiting 
 in strained anticipation and awe-struck suspense. 
 Then “ the earth shook and trembled ” (Ps. xviii. 7), 
 the “ heavens also dropped,” “ Sinai itself was moved 
 at the presence of God” (Ps. lxviii. 8), “the hills 
 melted like wax” (Ps. xcvii. 5), and through the dread 
 
36 
 
 THE SABBATH 
 
 phenomena of the storm and blackness, the lightnings 
 and thunders of the desert, the invisible God, the God 
 of Israel and the whole earth, made His majesty felt 
 and His mind known. The Ten Words were pro¬ 
 claimed, which were to be the basis of a solemn en¬ 
 gagement between God and Israel, and the witness to 
 His will regarding His people’s life andduty; to which, 
 for that reason, the Old Testament gives such names 
 as these—“His covenant ” (Deut. iv. 13), “the words 
 of the covenant ” (Exod. xxxiv. 28), “ the tables of 
 the covenant” (Deut. ix. 9), the “two tables of the 
 testimony” (Exod. xxxi. 18). In these Ten Words 
 were laid the foundations of all piety and probity, 
 and among the great principles which they em¬ 
 bodied on the acknowledgment of one God, His 
 spiritual worship, the honour of parents, the respect 
 due to life, purity, truth, and unselfishness, a central 
 place was given to the remembrance of the Sabbath. 
 The Ten Words thus published were not for the 
 moment only, nor for a single people. The spoken 
 word was committed to the keeping of the two 
 tables of stone, and these to the custody of the Ark. 
 After many wanderings and changes of fortune, the 
 Ark was deposited at last in the new Temple which 
 Solomon built for the glory of God, and being 
 opened, was found to contain “the two tables of 
 stone which Moses put there at Horeb, when the 
 Lord made a covenant with the children of Israel” 
 (1 Kings viii. 9), and nothing but these. The sacred 
 Ark and the granite slabs of Sinai which seemed 
 defiant of time, have perished. But the Ten Words 
 live in the conscience of all civilised races, and 
 continue to speak as the Christian law of duty, with 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 37 
 
 the new honour put upon them and the new signifi¬ 
 cance given them by Christ. And with them and in 
 their heart lives the law of Sacred Rest. 
 
 20. THE TERMS OF THE SABBATH-LAW IN 
 EXODUS (ch. xx. 8-11).—In the Pentateuch the Ten 
 Words appear in two forms, in one form in the twen¬ 
 tieth chapter of Exodus, and in another in the fifth 
 chapter of Deuteronomy. These are not precisely 
 alike in every point, and their characteristic differences 
 are of interest. In this second book of the Pentateuch 
 the Sabbath law is stated in terms which deserve our 
 careful study. It differs in form from the other laws. 
 The first three and the last five take the negative or 
 prohibitive form—“ Thou shalt not.” The fourth,like 
 the fifth, is expressed positively. It is introduced by 
 a word which appears in none of the rest. This word, 
 “ Remember,” might recall an institute of former 
 times which had been allowed to slip out of memory 
 and regard, or was in peril of that. But here it has 
 rather the general sense, already referred to, of 
 keeping in mind or giving attention to. For in the 
 other version of the Ten Commandments it is 
 represented by the simple phrase, “ Keep the Sab¬ 
 bath day” (Deut. v. 12). It speaks to us in either 
 case of the danger of forgetting or neglecting it. 
 The Sabbath was thus to be remembered, as the 
 terms of the law further state, with a view to “ keep it 
 holy,” or to “ sanctify it,” as it is rendered in Deuter¬ 
 onomy v. 12. This expression, which means 
 properly to “ set apart,” declares it to be the Divine 
 intention that the day should be separated from the 
 common uses of other days, as the Hebrew people 
 themselves were to be a people elect and apart from 
 
38 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 others. And the particular day to which such peculiar 
 honour was to belong was not left to the Israelite’s 
 own choice, so that he might set apart the first or 
 second or any other of his own preference. It was 
 chosen for him, and was to be the seventh in the 
 order of days. Its separation was to express itself 
 in the cessation of ordinary work. Six days were 
 to be free to the Israelite, in which to take up man’s 
 burden of honest toil and engage in common things 
 with a good conscience. But the seventh day was to 
 detach him from all servile or wearing toil, and 
 restrain him from all common, secular, selfish work. 
 This discharge from labour is given in detail. It 
 was to extend not only to the head of the house 
 himself, but to the members of his family, both sons 
 and daughters ; and not to the master only, but to 
 those who toiled for him, whether men-servants or 
 the still more dependent maid-servants. To these 
 classes the law meant on the one hand the same 
 obligation to honour the Sabbath as bound the 
 responsible head of the house, and on the other 
 hand the same blessing of release from toil as 
 came to him. Nor was the benignant sweep of the 
 institution limited even to these. It was to be the 
 protection of the “ cattle,” so apt to become the 
 dumb victims of man’s thoughtlessness or merciless¬ 
 ness. And it was to take within its shelter, as well 
 as pledge to its observance, another class, destitute 
 of the natural rights of the born Israelite and 
 peculiarly in need of consideration—“ thy stranger 
 that is within thy gates ” ; in other words, foreigners 
 who had become resident in the Hebrew com¬ 
 munities. And this great law of the Sabbath-rest, 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 39 
 
 with all the duties which it enjoined, and the rights 
 which it secured, is stated to have its reason in the 
 example of God the Creator. The Divine rest 
 following the Divine Creation ; the Divine regard 
 and blessing stamped upon the day by the Maker 
 of all things when He continued His creative work 
 through six days and ceased from it on the seventh, 
 —these were to be at once the motive and the model 
 for the observance of the Sabbath. 
 
 21. THE TERMS OF THE SABBATH-LAW IN 
 DEUTERONOMY (ch. v. 12-15).—The edition of the 
 Fourth Commandment which is given in Deutero¬ 
 nomy is substantially the same as that in Exodus. 
 In certain things, however, it varies the statement, 
 and these things have their own purpose and interest. 
 There are two minor points of difference in the 
 opening sentences. It expresses the Divine injunc¬ 
 tion by the term “keep,” instead of “remember,” 
 and it adds the words, “ as the Lord thy God hath 
 commanded thee ” (v. 12). But its chief peculiarity 
 is the larger expression which it gives to the bene¬ 
 ficent intention of the institution. It makes special 
 provision again for the “ stranger within the gates,” 
 having careful regard for the risks and disadvan¬ 
 tages of this class. These naturalised aliens, people 
 of other races who had become domiciled in the 
 land, came to be a very numerous body. Their 
 ranks were recruited from several sources—from 
 the “ mixed multitude ” that went up with Israel out 
 of Egypt, from the old population of Canaan, from 
 captives taken in war, from hired servants and 
 traders. In Solomon’s time they numbered 153,600 
 males (2 Chr. ii. 17). Those of them who were 
 
4 © 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 bondmen were circumcised ; those who were free 
 might or might not be so. But all were bound to 
 observe the great laws of Israel’s religion, and all 
 were secured in important rights under the Mosaic 
 ordinances. Such a class needed protection against 
 the temptation, so natural to the native, to treat the 
 alien with contempt or harshness. The Mosaic 
 law, therefore, required of the Israelite that he 
 should treat the “ stranger ” as a brother (Lev. xix. 
 34 ; Deut. x. 19). In a liberal spirit, unlike that of 
 other nations, it cared for his poverty, providing for 
 him as for the poor man, the fatherless, and the 
 widow ; making him free of the joy of the religious 
 festivals (Deut. xvi. 11, 14 ; xxvi. 11) ; giving him 
 to share in the gleaning of cornfield, vineyard, and 
 olive-yard (Lev. xix. 10; xxiii. 22 ; Deut. xxiv. 20), in 
 the triennial tithe, the forgotten sheaf, the produce 
 of the soil in the Sabbatical year (Deut. xiv. 28, 29; 
 xxiv. 19 ; Lev. xxv. 6). But here we get a more 
 specific assertion of the interest both of the brute 
 creation and of the servant in the benefits of the law. 
 Where the version of Exodus says generally “nor 
 thy cattle,” we have here the more particular state¬ 
 ment “ nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy 
 cattle,” so that neither draught beast, nor beast of 
 burden, nor any brute creature ministering to man’s 
 toil or need, should be denied its sacred privilege 
 of rest. And the claims of the servant are affirmed 
 in terms remarkable at once for their precision and 
 for the touch of feeling which softens them. 
 
 22. THE NOTE OF BENEFICENCE IN THE 
 DEUTERONOMIC LAW.— It is in the case of the 
 servant that the peculiar beneficence of the Sabbath 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 4i 
 
 law as given in Deuteronomy most appears. Slavery 
 was the normal condition of the Hebrew “ servant,’ 3 
 and to work was the slave’s lot. The number of 
 such “servants” was large, and they were drawn 
 from different sources. Native Hebrews might be 
 reduced to the servile position to a limited extent 
 and in special circumstances by paternal authority 
 (Exod. xxi. 7); more generally through poverty, or 
 through offences against property. A man guilty of 
 theft and unable to make restitution, was punishable 
 by loss of his liberty. A poor man might sell him¬ 
 self for a maintenance into servitude. Captives in 
 war, purchases from foreign dealers, resident aliens 
 sunk in poverty or crime, made a large class of non- 
 Hebrew slaves. The position of these servants 
 was better far in Israel than in many other nations. 
 They were kindly and justly treated as a whole, and 
 had important rights and privileges. But they re¬ 
 mained the “possession” of their masters, their 
 owners’ “money” (Lev. xxv. 45, 46 ; Exod. xxi: 21). 
 Their life was one of toil, and the female slave had 
 greater restrictions and burdens to bear than the 
 male. They had peculiar need of the protection of 
 the Law, especially against the misery of incessant, 
 grinding toil. Their case, theiefore, found its 
 sacred place in the heart of the Ten Words, and 
 peculiar regard is given it in the Deuteronomic 
 statement. Words are added, “that thy man¬ 
 servant and thy maid-servant may rest as well as 
 thou,” which set the slave’s right of rest on the 
 same level with the master’s. And in sympathy with 
 the same beneficent anxiety for the rights of those 
 large classes who were in bonds to toil, a different 
 
42 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 reason is here assigned for the observance of the 
 Sabbath. The statute is made to have its ground 
 not in the Divine Creative Rest, but in the Divine 
 deliverance from Egypt. This, though in no sense 
 inconsistent with the former, is a distinct ground or 
 motive, kindling the pathetic memories of the past, 
 and enriching the institution with the grateful recol¬ 
 lections of the rest from servile toil which was won 
 for them by the mighty hand of a redeeming God. In 
 the freedom and fulness of the Land of Promise the 
 Israelite was to remember what he himself had been 
 in the strange country of the oppressor and slave- 
 driver. Recalling the years of his grinding, unrest¬ 
 ing toil beneath the lash of the taskmaster and the 
 killing heats of Egypt, he was to see a brother in the 
 “ servant ” who did his work in the land of his in¬ 
 heritance. The Sabbath was to be a memorial of 
 the Divine event which made him free, a weekly 
 appeal to his sympathy and consideration for those 
 in bonds, a perpetual witness to the equality of all 
 such with himself in the sight of God in the benign 
 right of rest. 
 
 23. THE IDEA OF THE SABBATH IN THE 
 TEN WORDS.— The central idea of the Sabbath, 
 therefore, as it stands in the Decalogue, is that of 
 rest , in the sense of the intermission of ordinary 
 work on the part of all, whether bond or free ; and 
 especially in the gracious sense of the beneficent 
 right of relief from wearing toil on the part of the 
 dumb cattle and the helpless slave. It was a pro¬ 
 vision against the selfishness of man in the labour 
 to which he gave himself, and in that which he 
 exacted of others. It was a witness to the relations 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 43 
 
 in which the people stood to the God of Creation 
 and the God of Redemption. So it set before them 
 the Divine idea of their life—a life neither of idle¬ 
 ness nor of drudgery, a life not wholly common and 
 secular, but one of honest toil and periodic rest. 
 But, while discharge from toil is the central thing 
 in it, and the beneficent security for the rights of 
 the dependent is so largely expressed, these are 
 neither the only nor the primary interests. The 
 first thing in it is its sacred meaning and intention. 
 The institutions and festivals of Israel were all 
 religious ordinances, and the rest was to be a rest 
 “ to the Lord.” The note of what the Sabbath was 
 primarily to be is given at once in the opening 
 words of the Commandment in both its versions. 
 The object of the remembrance of the day was to 
 “keep it holy,” or to “sanctify it” by giving it a 
 place apart from other days, and by consecrating it 
 to other uses than theirs. “ It was in harmony,” as 
 is rightly observed, “ with the whole system of 
 Judaism, and was a most characteristic expression 
 of one of the great ideas of which Judaism was the 
 development. A nation was ‘ set apart ’ from all 
 other nations, was invested with special prerogatives 
 and entrusted with special duties. Within that elect 
 nation itself a tribe—the tribe of Levi—was ‘set apart’ 
 from all the other tribes, and similarly distinguished; 
 in that sacred tribe a priestly family—the family of 
 Aaron—was ‘ set apart ’ from all other families ; in 
 that family of priests an individual—the High Priest 
 —was ‘ set apart ’ from all other priests, and in him 
 this idea of personal consecration to God was repre¬ 
 sented in its higher form. A sacred building—the 
 
44 
 
 THE SABBATH 
 
 Temple—was ‘set apart’ from all other buildings 
 as being God’s dwelling-place ; the inner court was 
 ‘set apart’ from the rest of the Temple as being 
 especially God’s house ; and in that inner court the 
 Holy of Holies was ‘set apart’ from the holy place 
 itself as the very chamber of the Divine Presence.” 
 So while God was to be honoured by a proper use of 
 every day, one particular day was to be an elect and 
 peculiar day, “ set apart ” as specially and wholly 
 His. Thus it embodied the great principle that our 
 time is not our own, but something received from 
 God, and to be consecrated to Him. As a religious 
 institution it also looked to duties of worship and 
 provided opportunities for worship, which found 
 expression in particular ordinances of the Mosaic 
 Law. 
 
 24. PECULIARITY OF THE SABBATH AS A 
 MOSAIC INSTITUTION.— The broad terms in 
 which it is promulgated in the Decalogue, therefore, 
 show the Sabbath to be the embodiment of certain 
 primary ideas of moral and religious moment. These 
 ideas mark it out as a thing which stands alone 
 among all the religious institutions of early date. Its 
 prescriptions on labour and rest; its benign anxiety 
 to secure rights for the dependent and helpless; the 
 conception of life which it put before the Hebrew 
 people ; the religious character attaching to it as an 
 ordinance consecrated to the one living God, the 
 God of Creation and the God of Redemption, these 
 things and others which appear in subsequent and 
 more detailed statements of the Sabbath law, com¬ 
 bine to give it a wholly peculiar place in the religious 
 ordinances and observances of the old world. That 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 45 
 
 this institution of Israel was without any real parallel 
 among other ancient nations, is confessed by those 
 who have studied it most profoundly. One of the 
 greatest writers on the history of Israel whom our 
 century has produced speaks of it thus : “ What 
 Moses made of the last day of the week was something 
 quite new, something which had previously existed 
 among no nation and in no religion. The last day 
 was to be devoted to rest; all ordinary human toil 
 was to cease, an unwonted rest was to reign. Man 
 must therefore renounce the gain and enjoyment 
 which he sought in his ordinary occupation and 
 labours. This is the self-denying sacrifice which 
 he must here offer, something quite different from 
 all the sacrifices which the world had ever known 
 before, but one which is often far from easy for man 
 to make, seeing how covetous he is, or otherwise 
 plunged in the world’s unrest and turmoil. But yet 
 man shall not rest on this day for his own sake alone, 
 so as to sink into a vacant condition, characterised 
 only by the absence of activity, or yield himself up 
 to dissolute, savage pleasures, for the sake of passing 
 the time. The rest, says the Law from the very 
 first, shall be unto the Lord Jehovah, shall belong 
 to Him and be sanctified to Him. Man, then, shall 
 release his soul and body from all their burdens, with 
 all the professions and pursuits of ordinary life, only 
 in order to gather himself together again to God with 
 greater purity and fewer disturbing elements, and 
 renew in him the might of his own better powers. 
 If, then, the interchange of activity and rest is already 
 founded in the nature of all creation, and is the 
 more beneficial and health-bringing the more regular 
 
46 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 its occurrence, so should it be found here too ; yet 
 not as when in the night and in sleep the body is 
 cared for, but as when, in a joyous day of unfettered 
 meditation, the spiritual man already finds his true 
 rest, and thereby is indeed renewed and streng¬ 
 thened.”—(Ewald). 
 
 25. THE SABBATH AND THE SABBATICAL 
 CYCLE. — The Sabbath, with its peculiar signi¬ 
 ficance, however, did not stand alone in the Mosaic 
 institutions. It belonged to a remarkable Sabbatical 
 scale or cycle, in which it held the first and funda¬ 
 mental place. The different parts of this cycle have 
 the same general purpose and the same distinctive 
 character. The scale, which starts with the seventh 
 day, embraces the seventh month, the seventh year, 
 and the seven weeks of years. These periodical 
 times are also sacred times. They illustrate each 
 other, and throw into stronger relief the idea which 
 they have in common. The Sabbath, which is the 
 basis and keynote of the entire series, has its own 
 meaning further illumined when it is studied along¬ 
 side the other members of the sacred scale. 
 
 26. THE SACRED OR SABBATICAL MONTH 
 (Lev. xvi. 29-34; xxiii. 23-44; Num. xxix. 1-12).— 
 Among the months of the Jewish year a peculiar 
 position belonged to the seventh. It included three 
 institutions of great importance the Feast of 
 Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast 
 of Tabernacles. Each of these had its sacred 
 significance, and the month within which they fell 
 was the holy Sabbatical month. It opened with the 
 Feast of Trumpets, which appears to have been the 
 Festival of the Jewish New Year’s Day, this seventh 
 
THE SABBATH: 
 
 47 
 
 month, Tisri by name, being the first month in the 
 Jewish civil year. It differed in several things 
 from the ordinary festivals. It is described as “a 
 sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets ” 
 (Lev. xxiii. 24); “a day of blowing the trumpets” 
 (Num. xxix. 1). It was forbidden to do any servile 
 work on it; it was one of the days of “ holy convo¬ 
 cation,” and special offerings were made on it, con¬ 
 sisting of a young bullock, a ram, and seven lambs 
 of the first year, together with the usual meal- 
 offerings, and a kid as a sin-offering (Lev. xxiii. 
 24,25; Num. xxix. i-ii). Again, the tenth day 
 of this month was the Day of Atonement, the day 
 on which the High Priest, clothed in white linen, 
 offered atonement for sin—for objects and for per¬ 
 sons, for the sanctuary itself, the tent of meeting 
 and the altar, for the priesthood, and for the whole 
 congregation of Israel (Lev. xvi. 16). This day was 
 remarkable for the peculiar solemnity of its ritual, 
 especially for the casting of the lots upon two goats 
 presented before the Lord at the door of the taber¬ 
 nacle of the congregation; the killing of the one 
 goat and the sprinkling of its blood ; the confessing 
 of the people’s sins over the other goat, and its 
 dismissal into the wilderness (Lev. xvi. 7-22). It 
 was therefore a day of holy convocation and of 
 rest from all kinds of labour (Lev. xxiii. 27-29). It 
 was also a day of fasting, on which the Israelite 
 was to afflict his soul, on penalty of being “ cut off 
 from among his people” (Lev. xxiii. 29). Then on 
 the fifteenth day of this same month began the 
 festival, which is called “the Feast” in the New 
 Testament (John vii. 37), the Feast of Tabernacles 
 
48 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 (Lev. xxiii. 34)>oi>of Ingathering (Exod. xxiii. 14-16). 
 
 It recalled the time when the emancipated people 
 sojourned in the wilderness. Hence the remarkable 
 practice of going forth during its continuance to 
 dwell in booths made of the boughs of trees (Lev. 
 xxiii. 40-43). It celebrated also the completion of 
 the reaping of the fruits of the year, and was thus 
 the most joyous of all the Jewish festivals, and more 
 sacrifices were prescribed on it than on others. It 
 lasted seven days ; its first day was a day of holy 
 convocation, and it was followed by a solemn 
 assembly or holy convocation on the eighth day 
 (Lev. xxiii. 36). So this seventh month was pei- 
 vaded by the Sabbatical idea. Its first day was “a 
 sabbath,” a day “of holy convocation” (Lev. xxiii. 
 23, 24; Num. xxix. 1), on which no servile work 
 could be done. Its tenth day was “ a day of holy 
 convocation” and “a sabbath of rest” (Lev. xviii. 27, 
 32 ; Numb. xxix. 7); and the same sacred Sabbati¬ 
 cal character belonged to its fifteenth day and to 
 the day following the seven days’ period of the glad¬ 
 some feast of Ingathering (Lev. xxiii. 34, 36 ; Num. 
 xxix. 35). 
 
 27. THE SABBATICAL YEAR (Exod. xxiii. 9-12 ; 
 Lev. xxv. 1-7 ; Deut. xv. 1-3).—As among the 
 months so among the years, the seventh had a 
 sacred Sabbatical position. Its peculiar character 
 is seen so far in certain provisions which were made 
 on behalf of bond-servants. Among the many 
 humane “judgments” which the law set before the 
 people was one which provided that a Hebrew 
 servant who had been bought should serve only six 
 years, and “ go out free for nothing ” in the seventh; 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 49 
 
 that the wife of one who was married when he be¬ 
 came a bondman should go out with him ; and that 
 the Hebrew servant, whether man or woman, should 
 not go out empty, but liberally furnished out of the 
 master’s flock and floor and winepress (Exod. xxi. 
 1-5 ; Deut. xv. 12-15). But this consecrated char¬ 
 acter of the seventh month is seen more definitely 
 in the ordinances given in the twenty-third chapter 
 of Exodus and the twenty-fifth of Leviticus, which 
 provide that the land itself shall have its Sabbath. 
 In the former chapter it is prescribed that, while 
 the land shall be sown and its fruits reaped for six 
 years, it shall “rest and lie still” on the seventh, 
 and that the same shall be the case with the vine¬ 
 yard and the olive-yard. In this passage the ordin¬ 
 ance of the Sabbatical year is also connected im¬ 
 mediately with the law of the Sabbath-day (v. 12), 
 and its humane intention is stated in the most dis¬ 
 tinct terms. It is preceded by words charging 
 Israel with the great duties of justice and considera¬ 
 tion in their dealings with the stranger, because their 
 own experience of Egypt made them “ Know the 
 heart of a stranger ” (v. 9) ; and its intention is 
 declared to be that the poor of the people ma^ eat 
 and the beasts of the field after them (v. 11). In 
 the second passage it is provided that the usual 
 sowing, pruning, and reaping shall be intermitted 
 every seventh year ; that on that year there shall be 
 no ingathering of harvests for the owner’s individual 
 behoof; but that the natural increase of the untilled 
 soil shall be the common support of master and 
 servant, freeman and bondman, Hebrew and 
 stranger, cattle and beast alike. In Deuteronomy the 
 
5 o THE SABBATH. 
 
 law of rest for the land is not re-stated, but a special 
 ordinance in the interest of debtors is given, which is 
 in harmony with it and was probably related to it. 
 At the end of every seven years there was to be a 
 release , “ the Lord’s release,” as it is called, the full 
 benefit of which was to be enjoyed by the poor 
 debtor who was a native Israelite, though not by the 
 foreigner who, not being bound by all that bound the 
 Hebrew, would not have a claim to all the coire¬ 
 sponding remissions. This law of “ release ” held 
 good, in all probability, not in perpetuity but only 
 for the year. As the land had its lest for the yeai, 
 so the poor debtor had rest for the year from the 
 pressure of his debt, no interest being exacted of 
 him and no proceedings being taken against him. 
 Like the laws of the triennial tithe (Deut. xiv. 28, 
 29) and the law of manumission (Deut. xv. 12-18), 
 this law of the Year of Release was a witness to the 
 humane consideration for the necessitous and the 
 burdened which made the Jewish legislation so 
 different from the legislations of many other ancient 
 nations. In the institution of the Sabbatical year 
 this consideration for the rights and needs of fellow- 
 men is so distinctive a feature, that it might seem 
 to be a purely moral ordinance, not a religious. 
 Everything in it, however, is finally referred to God. 
 Even the release for debt is “ the Lord’s release ” ; 
 and the whole provisions of the Sabbatical year 
 taught the Hebrew that his land was not his own, 
 as the provisions of the Sabbath day taught him 
 that his time was not his own. 
 
 28. THE JUBILEE YEAR (Lev. xxv. 8-16, 23-55 i 
 xxvii. 16-25).—The Sabbatical system was crowned 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 5i 
 
 by the year of Jubilee. The origin of this memor¬ 
 able word Jubilee is not quite certain, but it most 
 probably comes from a Hebrew word meaning either 
 a long-drawn sound , or the instrument by which 
 such a sound was produced. It has been questioned 
 also whether the Jubilee year was the forty-ninth 
 year or the fiftieth. Some have felt it difficult to sup¬ 
 pose that the land could support the people two 
 years running without tillage, and have concluded in 
 favour of the forty-ninth year. But the statements 
 in Leviticus xxv. 8, 10, 11, clearly indicate it to have 
 been the intention of the law that after the comple¬ 
 tion of seven Sabbaths of years there should come a 
 special year of rest. It is to the book of Leviticus 
 that we owe our knowledge of the institution and the 
 objects which it was meant to serve. No account 
 of it is given either in Exodus or in Deuteronomy ; 
 and the only other statement about it which occurs 
 in the Pentateuch is in connection with the appeal 
 to Moses to make provision that the inheritance 
 which had been given to the daughters of Zelophehad 
 should not pass away from Manasseh, the tribe 
 of the family of their father (Num. xxxvi. 4). 
 In the Prophets, however, there are passages 
 which appear to refer more or less distinctly to the 
 Jubilee, such as Isaiah lxi. 1, 2. The entrance 
 of the year of Jubilee was notified by blasts of 
 trumpets, probably curved horns, blown throughout 
 the land, proclaiming liberty to all the people. This 
 took place on the tenth day of the seventh month, 
 the day of Atonement. It is not stated by whom or 
 at what point of the day these trumpets were blown. 
 But in all probability this service would be per- 
 
5 2 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 formed by the priests ; for it was their function to 
 make similar announcements on other public 
 occasions (Num. x. 8). It is also reasonable to 
 suppose that the whole ceremonial of this solemn 
 day would be completed by the High Priest before 
 the Jubilee was inaugurated. If this was the case 
 then “ the contrast between the quiet of the day 
 and the loud blast of the trumpets at its close 
 must,” as is rightly observed, “have rendered 
 deeply impressive the hallowing of the year of 
 release from poverty and bondage” (S. Clark). It 
 must have made the gladness of the time and the 
 great idea associated with the institution, come 
 home with peculiar force to the mind of the 
 I sraclitc. 
 
 29. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE JUBILEE.— 
 
 The Jubilee Year was to be a time of liberty and 
 joy. This was indicated by three benign provisions. 
 In the first place, the year was to be hallowed by the 
 “ return of every man unto his possession and . . . 
 unto his family.” The possession originally assigned 
 to the family to which any Israelite belonged, if it had 
 passed away from his house, was to be given back ; 
 houses in walled cities, however, being exempted 
 from this law as not being connected with the tillage 
 of the soil (Lev. xxv. 30). In order to give further 
 security against oppression or injustice in this great 
 interest of the retention of landed patrimony, laws 
 were made which strictly regulated the sales which 
 became necessary when an Israelite was driven to 
 part with his property, and also adjusted the price 
 according to the period that would elapse ere the 
 Jubilee came round. In the second place, as in the 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 53 
 
 case of the Sabbatical year, the Jubilee year was to 
 be a time of rest for the land itself. The soil was to 
 be exempt from the usual ploughing, sowing, and 
 reaping, and men were to subsist on the spontaneous 
 increase of the earth. In the third place, it was to 
 bring manumission to the slave. If an Israelite 
 had become a bondman to any one, whether a 
 fellow-Israelite or a resident foreigner, the Jubilee 
 year was to set him free from the yoke, so that, if 
 the Jubilee intervened before the seventh year, 
 which also emancipated him, he might at once re¬ 
 turn to liberty. The only thing which could in¬ 
 terfere with this right was the voluntary renuncia¬ 
 tion of it by the man himself. If an Israelite 
 who, by reason of poverty, had sold himself into 
 bondage to another Israelite, preferred to continue 
 in his servitude when the time came, either by re¬ 
 currence of the seventh year, or by the advent of the 
 Jubilee, to recover his freedom, he had to make that 
 clear by a formal and significant act. He had to 
 come before the judges, and allow his master to 
 bring him to the door, and bore his ear through with 
 an awl, fixing it to the door-post in token of his 
 permanent attachment to the service of the house. 
 One who thus voluntarily gave up his right no 
 doubt retained the privilege secured to every 
 Israelite who became bondman to another Israelite. 
 He was not to be set to slave-labour, but to the 
 work of a day-labourer and sojourner (Lev. xxv. 
 36-39). And nothing short of this public act of 
 voluntary renunciation could come in the way of his 
 emancipation at the Jubilee. So in Exodus it is 
 provided that the man who goes through this cere- 
 
54 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 mony shall serve his master “for ever (xxi._ 6); 
 while in Leviticus, where the privileges of the Jubilee 
 year are dealt with at length, it is stated that the 
 brother who has sold himself shall serve with his 
 master “until the Jubilee” and then “go out and 
 
 “return unto his own family” (xxv. 39, 4 1 )- 
 
 30. MEANING OF THE SABBATICAL CYCLE. 
 
 _The great ideas of rest and restoration, therefoie, 
 
 were expressed by the Sabbatical cycle, the Sab¬ 
 bath itself forming the basis of all. The seventh 
 day and the seventh month spoke of the rights of 
 the Israelite, and the recovery of those rights where 
 they had been alienated for a time. The seventh 
 year and the fiftieth spoke also of the rest of the 
 land and the restoration of the Israelite’s patrimony 
 in it. The Jubilee year specially embodied the great 
 idea of restitution , the return of the community or 
 society of Israel to the Divine order. “ God, who 
 once redeemed His people from Egypt’s bondage, 
 appears here again as their Redeemer, by not only 
 giving liberty to the slave, but also providing for 
 the poor a certain portion of the heritage of His 
 people, since there were to be no poor among the 
 covenant people. To bring about such a year of 
 a-race, sins had to be forgiven ; therefore, the year 
 of Jubilee was proclaimed on the Day of Atone¬ 
 ment ” (CEhler). These Sabbatical times were all 
 humane institutions, providing for the rest of the 
 toiler, the maintenance of the poor, the freedom o 
 the enslaved. They put a check upon the selfishness 
 of man, upon the inordinate amassing of wealth, the 
 appropriation of the land by the few, and all that 
 interfered with the rights of the people and a healthy 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 55 
 
 social order. They were also religious institutions, 
 teaching the great principles of Israel’s dependence 
 on God and the Divine idea of what Israel was de¬ 
 signed to be to God. They meant that the Israelite 
 held all of God and was to honour God in all, that 
 both his time and his land were to be recognised as 
 God’s, and that he himself was God’s possession and 
 servant. So when the Levitical Law ordains the 
 restoration of the patrimony of Israelites, it gives 
 this as the reason for the assertion of that right, 
 “The land shall not be sold for ever : for the land is 
 Mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me” 
 (Lev. xxv. 23). . And when it speaks of the recovery 
 of their liberty by bond Hebrews, it founds the 
 privilege on the fact that they are God’s servants 
 and His only, “For they are My servants which I 
 brought forth out of the land of Egypt.” “ For unto 
 Me the children of Israel are servants, whom I 
 brought forth out of the land of Egypt” (Lev. xxv. 
 42 , 55 )- 
 
 31. THE INTERPRETATION AND APPLICA¬ 
 TION OF THE SABBATH-LAW. — The Fourth 
 Commandment contents itself with stating the great 
 principle of the Sabbath-law. In other sections of 
 the Pentateuch we find enactments defining the ap¬ 
 plication of the law and regulating the observance 
 of the institution. As it stands in the Decalogue 
 itself, the principle of the law is the broad principle 
 of rest from work ; and the terms in which it is 
 expressed show that by this was meant not 
 merely release from servile labour, but cessation 
 of all kinds of work and business. In the Deca¬ 
 logue itself, as we have seen, the religious char- 
 
56 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 acter of the institution is also recognised. The 
 seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lovdj it is 
 blessed and hallowed by the Lord ; it is the Lord 
 who commands it to be kept. But, as in the case 
 of all laws, questions would arise regarding its ap¬ 
 plication to particular cases, and the way in which 
 it was to be carried out both in its negative aspect of 
 a prohibition of work and in its positive aspect of a 
 religious institution. The Decalogue itself, in pro¬ 
 mulgating the principles, does not concern itself 
 with the answers to be given in detail to such ques¬ 
 tions. But other statements and enactments in the 
 Pentateuch indicate how much was to be under¬ 
 stood to be embraced within the prohibition of work, 
 what limitations were applicable to it, how it was to 
 be enforced, and in what way the Sabbath-law was 
 to be observed both in its negative aspect and in its 
 positive. The other historical books of the Old 
 Testament, and the writings of the prophets, give us 
 further light on some of these matters, and also 
 show us how the law was regarded from time to 
 time, the abuses into which it fell, and the steps 
 taken to rectify these and to restore the institution 
 to its proper honour. 
 
 32. NEGATIVE REGULATIONS AND ENACT¬ 
 MENTS : LIBERTY OF MOVEMENT (Exod. xvi. 
 29).—In the Pentateuch we find three passages, all 
 in the second book, dealing with the negative or 
 prohibitive aspect of the legislation. One of these 
 provides that on the Day of Rest the Israelite 
 shall remain in quiet in his own dwelling. “ Abide 
 ye every man,” Moses is reported to have said, 
 “ in his own place, let no man go out of 
 
57 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 his place on the seventh day ” (Exod xvi. 29)• 
 This injunction belongs to the history of the first 
 descent of the Manna. It was meant to put a 
 check on the inclination to leave the camp as 
 on other days, in quest of the heaven-given food. 
 It is to be understood in the light of its im¬ 
 mediate purpose. But the later Jews, forgetting 
 its historical occasion and missing its spirit, turned 
 it to strange uses. An extreme sect, putting a 
 perversely literal sense upon it, took it to mean 
 that no one was at liberty, during the length of 
 the Sabbath day, to change the position in which 
 he chanced to be when the sixth day ended. On 
 the basis of this injunction it also came to be 
 prescribed that no Jew was at liberty to move 
 more that 2000 cubits (about 6 furlongs) from the 
 place of his abode. This was called the “ Sabbath 
 limit.” It is the “sabbath-day’s journey” which 
 is mentioned in the opening chapter of the Book of 
 Acts, in the narrative of the return of the disciples 
 to Jerusalem after the sight of their Lord’s ascen¬ 
 sion from “the mount which is called Olivet” (Acts 
 i. 12). This estimate of the length of walk or 
 journey permitted on the Sabbath is supposed to 
 have been made on the analogy of the space 
 which was to intervene between the Ark and the 
 people, according to the statement in the Book of 
 Joshua (iii. 4). But the misapplied ingenuity of 
 the Rabbis found a way of relief from this incon¬ 
 venient restriction on the liberty of movement. 
 They devised an expedient which was known as 
 “ the connection of boundaries.” This meant that 
 if one wished to go more than 2000 cubits from 
 
58 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 home on the seventh day, he had only to place food 
 sufficient for two meals at some point within the 
 legal limit before the Sabbath began. The food 
 thus deposited was held to mark the spot as one 
 which the man designated for his dwelling-place 
 for the time, and he was then deemed to be free to 
 walk not only the distance between his actual home 
 and the place so marked, but 2000 cubits beyond 
 that. 
 
 33. NEGATIVE ENACTMENTS: THE PENAL 
 
 LAW (Exod. xxxi. 12-17).—A considerable section 
 of the Book of Exodus (ch. xxv. 1.—xxxi. 11) is 
 occupied with the directions for the making of the 
 Ark and the Tabernacle, the separation and con¬ 
 secration of Aaron to the priesthood, and the con¬ 
 struction of the altar of burnt-offering and the altar 
 of incense. The giving of these directions is followed 
 in the narrative of Exodus by a solemn restatement 
 of the Sabbath-law, its sanctity, its peculiar mean¬ 
 ing, and the penalty for any breach of it. It is 
 proclaimed specially as a “ sign ” between God and 
 Israel, a sign giving the people to know that the 
 Lord sanctified them and set them apart and claimed 
 them for His own, a sign of “ a perpetual covenant ” 
 between them and Him, and, therefore, a thing 
 to be observed “ throughout their generations ” 
 (Exod. xxxi. 16). Its sanctity and its binding 
 obligation, as thus enforced, lay in its being a token 
 of the relation of grace in which Israel stood, the 
 covenant - relation into which God entered with 
 them and they with Him. To break the Sabbath, 
 therefore, was to break the covenant. The man who 
 dishonoured the law by working on the seventh 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 59 
 
 day was to “be cut off from among his people” 
 (xxxi. 14). He put himself outside the pale of 
 the covenant. He became an outlaw, and the 
 outlaw forfeited all rights. The fact that this re¬ 
 assertion of the holiness of the Sabbath and this de¬ 
 claration that the violation of it constituted a capital 
 offence, are introduced at the close of the in¬ 
 structions for the building of the Tabernacle, has led 
 many to conclude that the immediate object was 
 to guard Israel against the supposition that they 
 might be less scrupulous in their observance of the 
 Sabbath law when engaged in so holy a work as 
 that. However that may be, the penalty attached 
 to a breach of the law in this matter had its deep¬ 
 est and most permanent reason in the relation in 
 which the Sabbath stood to the covenant between 
 God and Israel, and in its significance as a token 
 of the allegiance of the people to their Divine king. 
 Every religion has some usages in which it seeks to 
 express “ its entire significance and spirit, as well 
 as its external validity and sanctity” (Ewald). 
 These rites keep the religion, its beliefs, its laws, 
 its essential meaning, before the minds of its ad¬ 
 herents. They become “ the seal of the public 
 conscience,” as they have been appropriately called; 
 and consequently a peculiar sacredness belongs 
 to them. The religion of Israel had such sacra¬ 
 mental rites in the institution of circumcision, which 
 was the token of entrance into the Church and 
 Community, and in the annual celebration of the 
 Passover. But the Sabbath was in a very special 
 sense, and from the beginning of Israel’s national 
 existence, a sacrament of Israel’s religion, a token 
 
6o 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 of God’s grace to His people and of the people’s 
 obligation to Him. The protection of the Sabbath 
 was the protection of the religion. The dishonour 
 of the Sabbath was the dishonour of the religion 
 as such. Hence, as was the case also with the 
 sin of blaspheming the name of God, the deliberate 
 breach of the Sabbath had all the significance of a 
 capital offence against the community of Israel and 
 the God of Israel. 
 
 34. NEGATIVE ENACTMENTS: THE CASE 
 OF FIRES (Exod. xxxv. 1-3).—The account of the 
 directions for the construction of the Tabernacle 
 in the Book of Exodus is interrupted by the report 
 of the idolatry of the people during the absence 
 of Moses on the Mount, the breaking of the Tables 
 of Stone, the intercession of Moses, the renewal of 
 the Tables, and the descent of the Lawgiver from 
 Sinai with the glory shining on his face (Exod. 
 xxxii.-xxxiv.). The report of the instructions for 
 the erection of the sanctuary is then taken up 
 anew, and is prefaced by another statement of the 
 sanctity of the seventh day, the ordinance of rest, 
 and the penalty of death for a trespass of the law 
 by work. To this is added the command that no 
 fire should be kindled throughout the habitations 
 of Israel on the Day of Rest. This interpretation 
 of the general principle of cessation of work is 
 implied in the direction given in the case of the 
 Manna, that the baking and seething of food which 
 was intended for the seventh day should be done 
 on the sixth day. Here it is delivered in express 
 terms, and in the hearing of the whole people 
 gathered in special assembly. It does not appear 
 
THE SAB BA TH. 
 
 61 
 
 that this prohibition held good for other sacred 
 days. In the case of the Feast ot Unleavened 
 Bread, for example, while common secular work 
 was forbidden, it was permitted to do any kind of 
 work necessary for the preparation of food. “No 
 manner of work ” was to be done on the first day 
 or the seventh of that feast, “ save that which every 
 man must eat, that only may be done of you” 
 (Exod. xii. 16). But in the case of the Sabbath the 
 use of fire was forbidden even for cooking purposes. 
 Nothing is said of the application of this enact¬ 
 ment to the rites of worship. These were exempted. 
 The fire on the altar was to be kept perpetually 
 burning, and was to be fed with wood every morning 
 (Lev. vi. 12). This law of the disuse of fire on the 
 Sabbath-day was also made the subject of many 
 curious and confusing interpretations by the later 
 Jews, which have no place in the Mosaic books 
 themselves. Thus it was taught that no one was 
 at liberty to read with a light on the eve of the 
 Sabbath ; that if a Gentile lighted a lamp for a 
 Jew, the Jew could not use it, but that if a Gentile 
 lighted it without any view to the Jew’s need, the 
 Jew might use it ; that food, which it was desired 
 to eat hot on the Sabbath, and which had been 
 baked or boiled the day before, might be kept hot 
 by being put into substances like clothes, fruits, 
 pigeons’ feathers, or the tow of flax, which simply 
 maintained its heat, but not into things like salt, 
 chalk, sand, or damp vegetables, which would 
 increase the heat and so amount to the same as 
 the lighting of a fire. 
 
 35. THE CASE OF THE SABBATH-BREAKER 
 
62 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 IN THE WILDERNESS (Num. xv. 32-36).—The 
 Book of Numbers furnishes one notable instance of 
 the punishment of high-handed transgression of the 
 Sabbath-law. The narrative which that book gives 
 of the murmurings of the people when the spies 
 gave their account of the strength of the Canaan- 
 itish tribes, is followed by a report of the issue of 
 various regulations respecting offerings. Among 
 these are certain ordinances dealing with the 
 distinction between sins of ignorance and sins 
 of presumption, prescribing an atonement for the 
 former, and declaring that the man guilty of the 
 latter was to bear the penalty “of being cut off 
 from among his people” (xv. 27-31). It is in this 
 connection that the story of the Sabbath-breaker 
 is introduced. It appears to be brought in at this 
 point, therefore, as an instance of a presumptuous 
 or high-handed violation of the law, a thing done 
 wilfully, and in a spirit of bravado or defiance. 
 The name of the offender is not given, neither is 
 there any more definite statement of time and place, 
 than that the event occurred sometime during the 
 forty years when the people were in the wilderness. 
 The offence itself is described as that of gathering 
 “ sticks,” the word being that which is used of the 
 “ wood ” which Abraham clave for the burnt-offering 
 (Gen. xxii. 3, 9), of the “ wood ” which the sons of 
 Aaron were to put upon the fire on the altar (Lev. i. 7), 
 and of the timber employed for the making of the Ark 
 (Exod. xxv. 10). Those who came upon the man thus 
 engaged in open transgression of the law, brought 
 him before Moses and Aaron and the congregation 
 for judgment. He was put in ward for a time, 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 63 
 
 until his case had adequate consideration. The 
 penalty of death was attached by the law to the 
 offence in question (Exod. xxxi. 14 ; xxxv. 2). The 
 reason for the delay may have been that the par¬ 
 ticular method of death had not yet been determined, 
 or it may have been the propriety of considering 
 whether the offence reported was one lacking all 
 mitigating circumstances, and deserving the utmost 
 penalty of the law. The result was that the offender 
 was condemned to death by stoning, which was 
 the ordinary Jewish method of executing capital 
 sentences in the case of idolatry, blasphemy, and 
 the gravest moral offences (Lev. xx. 2 ; Deut. xiii. 
 6, 10 ; Lev. xxiv. 14, 16, 23 ; Deut. xxi. 18-21). This 
 defiant transgressor of the Sabbath-law, therefore, 
 was dealt with precisely as the unnamed son of 
 Shelomith was dealt with, who “ blasphemed the 
 name of the Lord, and cursed” (Lev. xxiv. 10-16). 
 The narrative shows how the sanctity of the Sab¬ 
 bath-law had established itself in the consciousness 
 of the people. 
 
 36. POSITIVE ENACTMENTS FOR THE 
 OBSERVANCE OF THE SABBATH; THE 
 HOLY CONVOCATION (Lev. xxiii. 3, 24, 33-38).— 
 Besides these negative prescriptions which took 
 the form of explanations and applications of the 
 general principle of abstention from work, we find 
 in the Mosaic books certain positive statements and 
 regulations providing for the proper observance of 
 the day, and exhibiting its fundamentally religious 
 meaning. One of these is the declaration that it 
 is to be a day of “ holy convocation.” This ex¬ 
 pression, “holy convocation,” is confined almost 
 
64 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 wholly to the Pentateuch, occurring elsewhere only 
 in Isaiah (i. 13 ; iv. 5,) where our English Bible 
 renders it “assembly.” No explanation of it is 
 given in set terms, but it seems to designate a 
 gathering for religious purposes as distinguished 
 from ordinary meetings of the people. Certain days- 
 of the great festivals were days of holy convocation. 
 The first day and the last day of the Feast of 
 Unleavened Bread, the first day of the Feast of 
 Tabernacles, the day following that Feast, the Day 
 of Pentecost, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast 
 of Trumpets, had that character (Exod. xii. 16 ; Num. 
 xxviii. 18, 25, 26; xxix. 1, 12, 35). But in addition 
 to these seven, which made an annual festal series, 
 the weekly Sabbath was also set apart for a “ holy 
 convocation,” as is expressly stated. The idea of 
 meeting for religious worship and edification was 
 thus associated with it in an important section of 
 the Book of Leviticus, which gives the list of sacred 
 days with which meetings for worship were con¬ 
 nected (Lev. xxiii. 1-8, 15-38). The Levitical law 
 thus designated the weekly Sabbath in a very 
 special sense a day for religious fellowship and 
 edification. The Sabbath and the sanctuary are 
 at times associated in a way which has suggested 
 the inference that there was a gathering for worship 
 or for the hearing of the Law in the courts of God’s 
 House (Lev. xix. 30; Ezek. xxiii. 38) ; and some 
 have found references to such a custom in passages 
 like Lev. x. n ; Deut. xxxiii. 10. The oldest 
 Jewish tradition speaks of the Sabbath as intended 
 to be a stated opportunity for religious instruction 
 and edification. The Old Testament, as we shall 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 65 
 
 see, contains things which indicate that, at least in 
 the period of the Kings, it was the custom for 
 those who were at a distance from the Temple to 
 avail themselves on the Sabbath of the instructions 
 of the prophets (2 Kings iv. 23). And from the 
 New Testament we learn that in the times after 
 the Exile, when the Synagogue became the 
 religious meeting-place in the Jewish towns and 
 villages, it was the custom to gather there on the 
 Sabbath-day for the reading of the Law and the 
 hearing of addresses of exposition and exhortation. 
 So our Lord Himself taught in the synagogues of 
 Galilee (Luke iv. 15). Paul with his company 
 entered the synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia, “on 
 the Sabbath-day, and sat down,” and “after the 
 reading of the law and the prophets,” he discoursed 
 to the people at the request of the rulers, reminding 
 them of the “ voices of the prophets which are read 
 every sabbath-day,” and preaching the Risen 
 Messiah (Acts xiii. 14, 15, 27). At the meeting of 
 the Apostles and elders in Jerusalem, too, at which 
 Paul and Barnabas were recognised and the 
 Gentiles were declared to be free of the necessity 
 of being circumcised, James referred to the public 
 reading of Scripture on the Sabbath as an in¬ 
 stitution of ancient date and universal prevalence, 
 in these words : “For Moses of old time hath in 
 every city them that preach him, being read in the 
 synagogues every sabbath-day” (Acts xv. 21). 
 
 37. POSITIVE ENACTMENTS; SPECIAL 
 OFFERINGS (Num. xxviii. 9, 10 ; Lev. xxiv. 5-9).— 
 The sacrifices which were offered every day in 
 the regular Temple service included the burnt- 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 offering of two lambs of the first year, one in the 
 morning and one in the evening. Meal-offerings 
 of flour, oil, and wine accompanied these (Exod. 
 xxix. 38-42 ; Num. xxviii. 1-8). But on the Sabbath 
 both the burnt-offering and the meal-offering were 
 doubled (Num. xxviii. 9, 10). These offerings 
 probably expressed the complete consecration of 
 the people to God, their thanksgivings, their 
 homage, and their recognition of the relations of 
 grace and dependence between Him and them. 
 The shewbread, also, which is repeatedly mentioned 
 in the Law, in the historical books of the Old 
 Testament, and in the New Testament writings 
 (e.g., Exod. xxv. 30 ; xxxv. 13 ; xxxix. 36 ; Num. 
 iv. 7 ; 1 Sam. xxi. 6 ; 1 Kings vii. 48 ; 1 Chron. ix. 
 32 ; 2 Chron. iv. n ; Matt. xii. 4 ; Heb. ix. 2), was 
 renewed on the Sabbath-day (Lev. xxiv. 5-9). 
 This shewbread, or Bread of the Presence, or 
 “ Presence Bread ” (as the Revised Version renders 
 it in the margin) consisted of twelve newly baked 
 loaves, placed in two rows, or piles, of six each 
 on the table of Shittim wood in the sanctuary, and 
 sprinkled with incense. These loaves remained 
 till the end of the week. They were then removed 
 and eaten by the priests, and replaced on the 
 Sabbath by a fresh set of twelve. What was 
 precisely meant by this ceremonial is far from 
 certain. But it was another sign of the covenant 
 between Israel and God, and it has been under¬ 
 stood to mean the bread through which God is 
 seen, or with which the vision of God is connected. 
 So it has been taken to be not merely a token 
 of the dependence of Israel on God for physical 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 67 
 
 support, but the symbol of a higher life than the 
 physical, and of a bread whereof if the people ate, 
 they should see God’s face and have the joy of life 
 and fellowship with Him. It was another expres¬ 
 sive sign of the covenant between Israel and God; 
 as such it had a sacred significance, which made it 
 appropriate that the Sabbath should be the day of 
 its renewal. 
 
 Thus the religious meaning of the Sabbath was 
 expressed by many of these prescriptions of the 
 Law. In various ways they instructed the people 
 in the sacred character of the day as an ordinance 
 in which God was to be acknowledged and by which 
 opportunities were provided for worship and edi¬ 
 fication. Neither did these Levitical enactments 
 overlook what the Sabbath was intended to be also 
 to the families of Israel. Piety and filial duty were 
 intimately associated in the faith of the Covenant 
 people, and the institution which secured rest for 
 the toiler, time for worship, and facility for instruc¬ 
 tion in Divine things, was also recognised to be 
 the fence of all that was best and most gracious 
 in the home. As in the Decalogue itself, the 
 Commandment which bids us remember the Sabbath- 
 day to keep it holy , is followed immediately by that 
 which binds us to honour father and mother; so 
 in the Levitical Law the great law of filial duty is 
 repeated in one breath with that of observing this 
 sacred day. “Ye shall fear every man his mother 
 and his father, and keep my sabbaths : I am the 
 Lord your God” (Lev. xix. 3). 
 
 38. THE SABBATH IN THE HISTORICAL 
 BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT (2 Kings 
 
68 
 
 THE SABBA TH. 
 
 iv. 23; xi. 5, 7 ; xvi. 18).—The Sabbath is only 
 sparingly mentioned in the historical books which 
 give the narrative of events between the Mosaic 
 age and the return from the Babylonian exile. 
 In the Books of Kings and Chronicles, however, 
 there are some interesting references to it. In 
 the affecting story of the sickness and death of the 
 Shunammite’s child, the mother asks her husband 
 to send for one of the young men and one of the 
 asses that she may “run to the man of Godand 
 the husband asks her, “ Wherefore wilt thou go to 
 him to-day? It is neither new moon nor sabbath” 
 (2 Kings iv. 23). This passage may point, as we 
 have seen, to the custom of consulting the prophets 
 on the Day of Rest. It is taken indeed to imply 
 that meetings for worship were regularly held on 
 these days—new moon and Sabbath—and that they 
 were not omitted even in the evil times of the 
 house of Ahab. We have two accounts again of 
 Athaliah’s slaughter of the males of the royal 
 family in order that she might hold the throne for 
 herself; of the rescue of one son of the kingly 
 house of Ahaziah, the boy Joash, by Jehosheba, the 
 daughter of King Joram; and of the steps taken 
 by Jehoiada for the overthrow of the Baal-worship- 
 ping queen, and for the placing of Joash on the 
 throne (2 Kings xi. 1-16 ; 2 Chron. xxii. 10; xxiii. 
 12-15). In these it is mentioned that Jehoiada took 
 those steps on the Sabbath ; and that the guards 
 who went on duty and those who went off duty on the 
 Sabbath were appointed to look to the safety of the 
 young king’s person and the protection of the palace 
 on that occasion. In the account of the desecration 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 69 
 
 of the Temple by King Ahaz, in his desire to set up 
 in the sanctuary something like the heathen altar 
 which he had seen in Damascus, it is stated that 
 “the covert for the sabbath that they had built 
 in the house, and the king’s entry without, turned 
 he from the house of the Lord for the king of 
 Assyria” (2 Kings xvi. 18). From this it appears 
 that the king was accustomed to go to worship in 
 the Temple on the Sabbath ; that a “ covered way ” 
 (R.V.) or colonnade had been made for him to pass 
 along at such times ; and that because of the king 
 of Assyria a change was made in that “covert,” 
 by which is meant, perhaps, that it was stripped 
 of its decorations, lest they should excite the greed 
 of the grasping Assyrian. 
 
 39. THE SABBATH IN THE HISTORICAL 
 BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT; CHRON¬ 
 ICLES (1 Chron. ix. 32; 2 Chron. xxiii. 8; xxxvi. 21).— 
 The Books of Chronicles also contain some references 
 to the Sabbath and the Sabbath-laws, which should 
 be noticed. One of these, relating the measures 
 taken for the protection and proclamation of Joash 
 on the Sabbath-day, is mentioned along with the 
 parallel passage in 2 Kings in the previous para¬ 
 graph (2 Chron. xxiii. 8). In addition to this, we 
 learn from another passage that the duty of pre¬ 
 paring the shewbread on the Sabbaths was com¬ 
 mitted to Levites of the highest rank, those of the 
 family of Kohath (1 Chron. ix. 32). And a third 
 reference, one, too, of a remarkable kind, occurs near 
 the close of the Second Book of Chronicles. There 
 we have an account of the unworthy reign of 
 Zedekiah, the transgressions of the people, and 
 
70 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 the consequent destruction of Jerusalem, burning 
 of the Temple, and deportation of the Jews into 
 Babylonia. The author of the book adds that the 
 Jewish people were to be servants of the Babylonian 
 kings in the land of exile “until the reign of the 
 kingdom of Persia,” and that this was to be in 
 order “ to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth 
 of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sab¬ 
 baths ; for as long as she lay desolate she kept 
 sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years ” (2 Chron. 
 xxxvi. 21). Among the promises and threatenings 
 recorded in the Book of Leviticus, it had been 
 declared that if Israel refused to hearken to the 
 Lord and walked contrary to Him, their sin would 
 be punished by the wasting of their cities and 
 sanctuaries, and the dispersion of their people 
 among the heathen. And of that penal desola¬ 
 tion it had been said : “ 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 shall rest; because it did not rest in 
 your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it” (Lev. xxvi. 
 34, 35). The Book of Chronicles speaks of this 
 word of the Levitical Law as fulfilled in the 
 miseries of the exile ; and the desolation of Judah, 
 lasting through seventy years, is given as the 
 Divine retribution for the neglect of the Sabbath- 
 laws. By the non-observance of the Sabbaths and 
 the Sabbath-years, the land had been deprived 
 through a long tract of years of the rest appointed 
 for it under the Divine Law, and the conditions of 
 the exile are described as continuing for a like 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 7 i 
 
 period until the land should recover what it had 
 lost. 
 
 40. THE SABBATH IN THE HISTORICAL 
 BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT; NEHE- 
 MIAH (ix. 14; x. 31, 33).—The historical books which 
 give the annals of the Jewish exiles after their return 
 to their own land, make only occasional mention of 
 the Sabbath. The passages which deal with it, 
 however, are of much interest. They occur in 
 Nehemiah. That book gives the story of the per¬ 
 mission granted by the Persian monarch to his 
 favourite cup-bearer to proceed to Jerusalem and 
 rebuild the walls; of the opposition which Nehemiah 
 met, and the rapidity with which he pressed on the 
 work; of the patriotic zeal of the people, and the 
 revival of religious enthusiasm among them ; and 
 of the various steps taken by the Governor for the 
 redress of evils, the reading of the Law, and the 
 renewal of the national life. Among other things, 
 the Sabbath engaged the attention of Nehemiah 
 as a Reformer. On the day on which the people 
 were convened to make confession of the national 
 sins, and to engage themselves anew by covenant 
 to honour God’s Law, they were reminded of 
 the right judgments which God gave them from 
 Sinai, and how He made known unto them His 
 “holy sabbath” (Neh. ix. 14). They bound them¬ 
 selves, also, to the strict observance of the Sabbath- 
 day and the Sabbath-year, to abstain from traffic on 
 the former and from the exaction of debt on the latter. 
 The general principle of rest which had been given 
 in the Fourth Commandment, was now declared to 
 mean the prohibition of all buying on the Sabbath, 
 
72 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 Their intercourse with the heathen dwellers in the 
 land was a strong and constant temptation to the 
 Jews to engage in trade transactions on the holy 
 day. Nehemiah saw that the people could be pre¬ 
 served from this only by the rule of complete 
 abstention from all buying and selling on that day; 
 and they were pledged, therefore, not to purchase 
 either wares or food which might be exposed for 
 sale by their heathen neighbours. The law of the 
 seventh year, which brought rest to the land and a 
 suspension of the right to exact debt for the period, 
 was also re-inforced (Neh. x. 31). Provision was 
 made at the same time that every grown Israelite 
 should charge himself yearly with the payment of 
 “the third part of a shekel’ 5 for the service of the 
 house of God, “ for the shewbread, and for the con¬ 
 tinual meat-offering (or meal-offering), and for the 
 continual burnt-offering of the sabbaths” (Neh. x. 33). 
 
 41. THE SABBATH IN THE HISTORICAL 
 BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT; NEHE¬ 
 MIAH (xiii. 15-22).—The abuses, however, which 
 Nehemiah grappled with resolutely and energetically 
 on the occasion of his first mission to Jerusalem, were 
 renewed after he returned to the Persian Court. In 
 consequence of this he made a second visit to the 
 holy city in the year 432 B.c. He found the purity 
 and piety of the people again seriously endangered 
 by the permission of mixed marriages and the 
 policy of entering into foreign alliances, the priests 
 themselves being chief offenders. He made the 
 painful discovery, not only that the contributions 
 which the people had pledged themselves to give 
 for the maintenance of the Temple services were 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 73 
 
 withheld, but that the Sabbath itself was desecrated 
 and traffic pursued with Gentile traders through 
 its sacred hours. He saw secular work of various 
 kinds allowed to go on, the winepresses in active 
 operation, the sheaves or “ heaps of corn ” (R.V., 
 margin) being brought in, beasts of burden passing 
 in laden with wine, grapes, figs, and other com¬ 
 modities, Tyrians selling fish and other wares, and 
 the Covenant people making their purchases. He 
 protested with the nobles of Judah against these 
 profanations, and in order to check them, ordered 
 the gates of the city to be closed before the Sabbath 
 entered and to be kept shut till the day was done. 
 He posted his own servants at the gates to prevent 
 the introduction of merchandise. These measures 
 succeeded so far, but were not sufficient. The 
 merchants and sellers tried to evade him by settling 
 for the time just without the walls, and offering 
 their wares to such of the Jews as cared to come 
 outside. Nehemiah met this evasion by threaten¬ 
 ing to lay hands upon all who hung about the 
 walls for purposes of trade. This put a stop to the 
 unholy traffic ; and he completed his precautions 
 against it by appointing the Levites to watch the 
 city gates on the Sabbath, and to cleanse them¬ 
 selves for the discharge of so sacred a duty. By 
 these steps the Governor sought to recall the people 
 to a proper sense of the sanctity of the day, the 
 obligation they were under to keep it, and the 
 necessity of maintaining it in the utmost stringency 
 of its laws as a fence against perilous and corrupt¬ 
 ing compliance with heathen ideas and heathen 
 practice (Neh. xiii. 15-22). 
 
74 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 42. THE SABBATH AND THE PROPHETS; 
 AMOS AND HOSEA (Amos viii. 5 ; Hosea ii. n). 
 The Prophetical Books contain many statements on 
 the Sabbath which will repay our study. They are 
 of interest as showing us how the institution was 
 regarded at different times, both during the continu¬ 
 ance of the kingdom and after its subversion. In 
 the writings of such prophets as Amos and Hosea, 
 we see how it fared with the Sabbath in the eighth 
 century B.C.—a period of great importance in the 
 history of Judah and Israel. From Amos, the shep¬ 
 herd of Tekoa, a small place some twelve miles south 
 of Jerusalem, whose ministry belongs to the first half 
 of the eighth century, we gather how the day was 
 esteemed during the reigns of Uzziah, King of Judah, 
 and Jeroboam, King of Israel. His prophecy is a 
 prophecy of judgment on the kingdom of Israel be¬ 
 cause of its sins of injustice and false worship, the 
 luxury in which the ruling classes indulged, the 
 wrongs done to the poor. Under the figure ot a 
 basket of summer fruit (viii. 1-3), Amos represents 
 the nation as ripe for judgment. Among the things 
 which marked the people out as ready for doom, he 
 mentions the greed of gain which had eaten into the 
 hearts of the privileged and well-to-do classes, mak¬ 
 ing the Sabbath a weariness to them, and tempting 
 them to fraud in their commercial transactions. 
 They kept the religious times appointed by the Law, 
 but they did it in a spirit which grudged them as 
 interferences with the great business of amassing 
 wealth by whatever means, just or unjust. They 
 fretted for the close of the new moon and the 
 Sabbath-day, that they might return to the selling of 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 75 
 
 their corn and wheat (viii. 5). The prophecy of 
 Hosea, the son of Beeri, is of interest among other 
 things for the circumstance that it is the only written 
 prophecy which has come down to us from a native 
 of the Northern kingdom. His prophetic ministry 
 belongs to the period preceding and following the 
 death of Jeroboam II., in 729 B.c. He speaks of the 
 idolatries of Israel as sins against Jehovah’s love, 
 and among the divine punishments which would 
 come upon the persistent unfaithfulness of the people 
 to their Covenant God, he announces the loss of their 
 Sabbaths. The institution existed, but the joy of 
 that day and other appointed times of gladness, 
 rest, and worship, would pass away from a faithless 
 and treacherous nation (ii. 11). 
 
 43. THE SABBATH IN THE PROPHETS; FIRST 
 HALF OF ISAIAH (Is. i. 10-17).—Isaiah, the son of 
 Amoz, a native of Judah, and the greatest of the 
 prophets of the Old Testament, fulfilled a ministry 
 extending over at least forty years (about 740-701 
 B.c.). The writings which we possess under his 
 great name make frequent reference to the Sabbath, 
 and help us to understand the place which it had in 
 the national life at the different points of time in view 
 in these prophecies. Those references are few in 
 number, and they are limited mostly to the second 
 half of the book. In the opening chapter, however, 
 we have one instructive instance. 
 
 This chapter, which makes a preface to the whole 
 book, has been called “The Great Arraignment.’* 
 It takes the form of a judicial case between the 
 people of Judah as the defendants, and God as at 
 once the Plaintiff and the Judge, the prophet being 
 
76 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 witness. The burden of it is the worthlessness, 
 the hatefulness, of a religion which is not of 
 the spirit, but of the letter, consisting in laborious 
 sacrifice, ritual, and observance, all associated with 
 injustice, cruelty, and wrong. The Sabbath was kept 
 in these days, as the other institutions of the Law 
 were kept. It was observed even with punctilious 
 carefulness. But all was done formally and per¬ 
 functorily, in a spirit which made scrupulous atten¬ 
 tion to the letter of the divine ordinances an excuse 
 for further license in all unrighteousness. It was the 
 prophet’s mission to recall the people to morality 
 and duty; to re-awaken in them the sense of 
 God’s purpose in the Sabbath, in sacrifice, in sacred 
 seasons, and in assemblies for worship ; and to 
 bring home to their conscience His repugnance to 
 ordinances divorced from integrity and piety. The 
 Sabbath and iniquity, the solemn assembly and 
 wickedness—this was a conjunction He could not 
 bear. “ New moon and sabbath, the calling of 
 assemblies,—I cannot away with iniquity and the 
 solemn assembly” (i. 13, R.V.). 
 
 44. THE SABBATH IN THE PROPHETS; 
 SECOND HALF OF ISAIAH (lvi. 1-8 ; lviii. 13, 14 ; 
 lxvi. 22-24).—In the sublime chapters of the second 
 half of Isaiah, which make the crown of Old 
 Testament prophecy, the Sabbath appears as an 
 ordinance of privilege and joy. A special place is 
 reserved for its sanctification among the lofty ex¬ 
 hortations to the practice of the just and good 
 with which these chapters ring. It is commended 
 as a thing in closest association with righteousness 
 of life. In view of their near salvation, the people 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 77 
 
 of Jehovah are charged to “keep judgement and do 
 righteousness” (lvi. i, R.V.). The man who does 
 this in truth and constancy, neither profaning the 
 Sabbath nor putting his hand to evil, is assured of 
 the Divine blessing. And the prophet adds that 
 this blessing is as unrestricted as it is unfailing. 
 None need fear to be excluded from it. Two 
 classes are introduced as most under temptation to 
 harbour such fear—Gentiles who attach themselves 
 to the faith of the true God, and sons of Israel 
 suffering and serving in heathen courts. But the 
 latter, if they honour the Sabbaths of the Lord and 
 are true to His Covenant, will have within God’s 
 walls “ a memorial and a name better than of sons 
 and of daughters” (lvi. 4, 5, R.V.). And for the 
 former there will be access to His holy mountain, 
 joy in His house of prayer, and acceptance for their 
 offerings. The blessing which respect for the Sabbath 
 brings is not only for the Jew at home, but for the 
 Jew in foreign courts ; not for the Jew alone, but 
 also, and equally, for the stranger resident in the 
 land. In another chapter which sets true worship 
 over against the false, the spiritual fast over against 
 the formal, and the grace of goodness over against the 
 misery of wickedness, the hallowing of the Sabbath 
 of the Lord is conjoined with the fulfilment of the 
 great duties of love and right between man and man. 
 To him who is true to the latter there is the promise 
 of light, guidance, satisfaction, life (lviii. 10-12). 
 And to him who honours the former, not treading 
 the holy ground of God’s Day with the trader’s foot, 
 not profaning it by pursuits of selfishness or secular 
 business, but rejoicing in it for what it is in the Divine 
 
78 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 purpose, there is the assurance of honour and reward. 
 It will be the secret of glad fellowship with his God. 
 His delight in God’s Day will have the seal of God’s 
 delight in him (lviii. 13, 14). And the vision of the 
 new heavens and the new earth with which these 
 majestic prophecies close, the vision of the Divine 
 kingdom which the prophet saw beyond the con¬ 
 fusions of the present, is expressed in terms of the 
 sanctities of the Sabbath. It is the vision of a 
 regenerate society in which God shall be owned by 
 a worship answering the Divine idea of Israel’s 
 sacred seasons, continuous as from Sabbath to 
 Sabbath, and joyfully offered not by the Jew only 
 but by all flesh. The prophet could form no higher 
 conception of that new order which was to be the 
 goal of Israel’s history than the perfection and 
 perpetuation of all that the Sabbath meant (lxvi. 23). 
 
 45. THE SABBATH IN THE PROPHETS; 
 JEREMIAH AND LAMENTATIONS (Jer. xvii. 
 21-27 ; Lam. i. 7 ; ii. 6).—Jeremiah, the prophet 
 of sorrow, of the priestly city of Anathoth, one 
 of the noblest figures in the whole prophetic train, 
 also preaches respect for the Sabbath as the founda¬ 
 tion of all godliness. His ministry, extending as it 
 did through the reigns of Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoi- 
 akim, Jehoiachin, and the bitter days of Zedekiah, 
 the sacking of Jerusalem, the burning of the Temple, 
 and the overthrow of the Jewish State, was cast in 
 times of great social and political change, and of 
 lamentable neglect of piety and morality. Like 
 Cassandra, the prophetess of Troy, he had to speak 
 of national disaster, and to speak unheeded. Yet 
 he could also promise the suspension of judgment 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 79 
 
 and the restoration oi national prosperity as in 
 God’s band for a people who would turn again to 
 righteousness and religion ; and it is regard for the 
 Day of Rest that he singles out as the test of all 
 genuine conformity to the Divine Law. The sense 
 of the sanctity and beneficence of the Sabbath had 
 perished in those evil times ot national decay. It 
 was desecrated by trade and manual work. Town 
 and country joined hands in secularising it. The 
 rural population brought in their burdens of pro¬ 
 duce for sale in Jerusalem, and the city folk brought 
 out their wares for traffic on the day which was 
 meant to be sanctified to the Lord (xvii. 21, 22). 
 And the prophet’s word to kings, princes, and 
 people is, that a return to the hallowing of the 
 Sabbath will bring a return of religion, and with 
 that a return of prosperity and an assurance 
 of continuance; but that persistence in the pi o- 
 fanation of this ordinance will issue in national 
 destruction (xvii. 24-27). In the Book of Lamenta¬ 
 tions, , which is ascribed to the same prophet, and 
 in which we have a series of pathetic dirges bewail¬ 
 ing the bitterness of the cup given to the Jews 
 to drink in the capture of the city by Nebuchad¬ 
 nezzar, and its consequences, Jerusalem is repre¬ 
 sented as remembering “ in the days of her affliction 
 and misery all her pleasant things that she had in 
 the days of old,” and among these her Sabbaths, 
 which had become a mockery to her heathen 
 adversaries (i. 7). The bitterest thing, too, in 
 this cup of bitterness, is the consciousness that the 
 loss is the just penalty of national sin. It is the 
 Lord Himself in His righteous judgment of His 
 
So 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 people that has “caused the solemn feasts and 
 sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion ” (ii. 6). 
 
 46. THE SABBATH IN THE PROPHETS; 
 EZEKIEL'S ANNOUNCEMENTS OF JUDG¬ 
 MENT (Ezek. xx. 12, 16, 24; xxii. 8, 26; xxiii. 
 38). —Ezekiel, the priest, probably of the house of 
 Zadok, was carried into captivity in Babylon along 
 with Jechoniah and the flower of the people in the 
 year 597 B.C., and was settled with a band of the 
 Jewish exiles at Tel-Abib, by the stream Chebar. 
 His prophecies, which show the influence of the 
 teachings of Jeremiah, fall into two distinct halves 
 and deal with two great themes—the destruction 
 of the State and its final restoration. In both 
 divisions the Sabbath is introduced, in Jeremiah’s 
 way, as a central subject; in the one as a chief 
 article in the indictment against Jerusalem, in the 
 other as a main feature of the restoration. In his 
 survey of Hebrew history, the prophet recalls the 
 deliverance from Egypt and the life in the wilder¬ 
 ness, with the statutes and judgments which the 
 Lord gave His people that they might live by them. 
 Among these he specially instances the Sabbaths, 
 which were given to be a “sign” between Israel 
 and Jehovah, witnessing to the fact that He was 
 their God and they His people (xx. 10-12). He 
 reminds his fellow-countrymen in the day ot dis¬ 
 aster how their fathers failed in their covenant, 
 and incurred the Divine judgment, by polluting 
 the Sabbaths which they should have sanctified 
 (xx. 13-24). The same note is struck in the fresh 
 indictment against the city which occupies the 
 twenty-second and twenty-third chapters. In the 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 81 
 
 deadly list of Jerusalem’s sins, the lewdness, ex¬ 
 tortion, dishonesty, and various vices to which 
 princes, priests, prophets, and people alike gave 
 themselves, the profanation of the Sabbaths and 
 the hiding of the eyes from them are particularised 
 (xxii. 8, 26). And along with other offences of un¬ 
 faithfulness to God and intrigue with foreign powers 
 with which Samaria and Jerusalem, under the figures 
 of two evil women, Aholah and Aholibah, are charged, 
 the defilement of the sanctuary and the profanation 
 of the Sabbaths are named as sins of deepest guilt 
 committed in the same day. So dead had the 
 people become to the sense of the Divine Law, 
 that they set aside the holy seasons with heathen 
 debasement, and went straight from heathen idola¬ 
 tries and horrid oblations of their children into 
 God’s holy house (xxiii. 38, 39). 
 
 47. THE SABBATH IN THE PROPHETS; 
 EZEKIEL’S ANNOUNCEMENTS OF RESTORA¬ 
 TION (Ezek. xliv. 24; xlv. 17; xlvi. 1-4).—As 
 the Sabbath appears in the indictments of sins 
 and in the prophecies of national overthrow which 
 make the burden of the first twenty-four chapters, 
 it has an equally prominent place in the prophecies 
 of final restoration which occupy the last twenty- 
 four chapters. These prophecies take less the form 
 of an announcement of things future than that of a 
 picture of these things as already existing. It is a 
 picture of the Church or Society of Israel brought 
 back to its Divine ideal. In the final condition of 
 His Kingdom, which the Lord for His name’s sake 
 has in His purpose, prophet, priest, ruler, and 
 land shall each be according to Jehovah’s mind. 
 
 F 
 
82 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 The people shall be a people led by His Spirit; 
 the Temple, with all the holy things of His service, 
 shall be restored ; the Sabbath, with all its grace, 
 and sanctity, and gladness, shall be revived. The 
 priests shall be faithful to their trust, teaching the 
 people to distinguish between the holy and the 
 profane, to keep the Divine laws and statutes in 
 all God’s assemblies, and to hallow His Sabbaths 
 (xliv. 24). The people’s joy in the Sabbath-day 
 and in the holy service of their God will be the 
 note of the new order in a regenerate Israel. And 
 that joy will express itself in the glad regularity 
 of their worship and the liberality of their offerings. 
 Their gifts shall be placed, without shortcoming or 
 delay, in the hands of their prince, that all may be 
 done according to God’s law on the feasts, the new 
 moons, and the Sabbaths (xlv. 17)- People, priest, 
 and king shall be one in the solemnities of the 
 Sanctuary. The gate shall be open, that on the 
 Sabbaths the ruler may enter and take his part 
 in the worship, in which the people shall join at 
 the door, while the priests present the offerings 
 (xlvi. 1-3). And these offerings shall not be grudg¬ 
 ingly given. The spirit of munificence shall be in 
 the gifts. For the two lambs of the burnt-offering 
 prescribed by the Mosaic Law there shall be six 
 lambs and a ram without blemish ; and for the two- 
 tenth deals of flour mingled with oil, which of old 
 made the meal-offering, there shall be an ephah of 
 flour for the ram, a free gift according to ability for 
 the lambs, and a homer of oil (xlvi. 4, 5). So to this 
 great prophet, who from the bosom of a band of 
 exiles in the conqueror’s land spoke of the things 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 83 
 
 of God and the future of His broken people, the 
 worship of the Temple and the sanctities of the 
 Sabbath were so intimately connected with the 
 worth of life, and the purity of society, and the 
 joy of religion, that the vision of final peace and 
 blessedness was fo him a vision of the restoration 
 and perfection of these holy ordinances. 
 
 48. THE SABBATH OF THE OLD TESTA¬ 
 MENT. —What the Sabbath is in the teaching of 
 the Old Testament as a whole is now clear. Alike 
 in the Law and in the Prophets it is a Divine 
 institution, a gift of God to Israel, intended to serve 
 as a sign of the Covenant, a visible and abiding 
 memorial of the relations of grace and obligation 
 established between the Lord and His people, ex¬ 
 pressing the truth that, as He gave Himself to be 
 Israel’s God, they were to give themselves to be 
 His folk. All through the records of the Old 
 Testament dispensation it has the two great purposes 
 of rest and worship ; it is humane in its intention, 
 and religious in its order ; it is designed not to be a 
 burden on man’s life, but a relief and a joy, the 
 fence of the rights of the dependent and helpless; 
 a witness to man’s indebtedness to God for his time, 
 and to man’s obligation to consecrate it to Him. It 
 is given as an ordinance on which the Divine bless¬ 
 ing lies, having God’s Creative Rest for its model, 
 speaking of the deed of grace by which He delivered 
 Israel from Egypt and made them a people, and 
 calling men to a Divine order of life in which work, 
 and rest, and worship shall have each its place—an 
 order of life worthy of a being made in God’s image, 
 and received into His fellowship. It appears, also, 
 
84 THE SAB BA TH. 
 
 that it underwent a certain measure of change con¬ 
 sistent with its principle, and that it was observed 
 with different degrees of faithfulness at different 
 periods. In its history there are things to indicate 
 that the element of worship in the ordinance was 
 increasingly recognised, until it obtained its final 
 place in the full and orderly service of the Syna¬ 
 gogue after the Exile. We find, too, that the 
 restrictions on work became more definite and 
 pronounced in the later stage of Israel’s history, 
 when marketing and trading were stringently for¬ 
 bidden, and measures like those of Nehemiah were 
 adopted to give effect to the prohibition. Further, 
 it is gathered, especially from the writings of the 
 Prophets, that it was largely neglected before the 
 Captivity, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others 
 speaking of its profanation as one of the chief of 
 the national sins ; that its significance and value 
 were better owned in the period of the Exile and its 
 law more strictly observed ; and that, from the time 
 when Nehemiah bound the people to a new Cove¬ 
 nant, the sin of neglect was no longer chargeable 
 against them. This also is matter of history that at 
 no period, not even in that of the most rigorous 
 legal enforcement of its observance, did it cease to 
 be regarded as an ordinance of beneficence and 
 ioy, the minister, not the taskmaster of man. 
 
 49. THE SABBATH OF JUDAISM.— The ex¬ 
 periences of the Exile made a deep and lasting 
 impression on the Jews, their national ideas, their 
 beliefs, and their attitude to the Law. Among 
 other things they regained for the Sabbath such a 
 place in the mind and life of the people, that it 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 85 
 
 became more than almost any other ordinance or 
 institute the embodiment of their religion, the heart 
 of their Law, and the observance which marked them 
 off most sharply from other nations. It was natural 
 that it should be so. During the Captivity the Jews 
 were cut off from the use of those of their religious 
 ordinances and services, which had their home in 
 Jerusalem and the Holy Land itself. In these cir¬ 
 cumstances the Sabbath, which they could observe 
 by the streams of Babylon, was naturally the more 
 valued, and it became perhaps the chief means of 
 sustaining the national spirit and keeping them 
 together as a people. But this quickened interest 
 in the Sabbath and this stricter observance of its 
 laws to which the Exile gave the impulse, went from 
 one degree of stringency to another, in course of 
 time, until the beneficence of the institution and its 
 Divine purpose were lost in a mass of punctilious 
 formalities and minute regulations confusing to 
 conscience, burdensome to life, and far removed 
 from the inwardness of true piety. The change 
 which set in during the centuries between the Exile 
 and our Lord’s time resulted in Judaism, a harder 
 and more external form of religion than the earlier 
 faith of Israel, in the rigour and formalism of the 
 Pharisees and Scribes, and in an idea of life and 
 duty which, alike in morals and in piety, sacrificed 
 the spirit to the letter, internal disposition to 
 external correctness, the homage of the soul to cere¬ 
 monial scrupulosity. Like other things, the Sabbath 
 was deeply and disastrously affected by this change, 
 and became a severe ordinance hedged about by a 
 thousand restrictions and endless unspiritual pro¬ 
 nouncements on the letter of its observance. 
 
86 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 50. THE SABBATH OF THE SCRIBES.—The 
 
 professional custodiers and interpreters of the Law, 
 known to us in the Gospels as the Scribes, engaged 
 themselves very largely with questions of the Sabbath- 
 law. Some of their decisions, no doubt, were of the 
 nature of just and reasonable applications of the 
 Law to new circumstances. But, in many cases, 
 they were of the nature of petty, casuistical, or even 
 absurd refinements on the Law, which emptied the 
 Sabbath institute of all spirituality and of all 
 graciousness. They explained the broad principle 
 of rest from work as implying the prohibition of no 
 less than thirty-nine distinct kinds of work, not only 
 sowing, ploughing, reaping, and the like, but making 
 two cords, weaving or separating two threads, making 
 or untying" a knot, sewing two stitches, writing two 
 letters, carrying from one tenement to another, and 
 so forth. Each of these thirty forbidden kinds of 
 work, again, was made the subject of further dis¬ 
 tinctions, exceptions, and qualifications. In the case 
 of knots, for example, it was declared to be lawful to 
 tie or untie where only one hand was needed, to tie the 
 strings of a woman's cap or girdle, to fasten the 
 straps of the sandal or shoe. But the tying of the 
 knots of camel-drivers or sailors was held a breach 
 of the Sabbath-law. Definitions no less intricate 
 were given in connection with the rule against 
 bearing burdens. It was laid down with curious 
 precision that, in the case of carrying any of the 
 commodities of life out of the house, the quantity 
 that would amount to a desecration of the Sabbath 
 was so much food as might equal a dry fig in weight, 
 so much wine as might be mixed in a goblet, so 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 87 
 
 much milk as might be swallowed at one draught. 
 Nor did the painful, sophistical genius of the Scribes 
 pause even there. It carried its subtleties into the 
 remoter region of things which might only be pos¬ 
 sible occasions of a breach of any of these rules. 
 A writer was not allowed to go out with his reed at 
 twilight, nor a tailor with his needle, lest he should 
 forget when the Sabbath entered and profane it by 
 the things of his craft. It was pronounced a pro¬ 
 fanation of the Sabbath to climb a tree or ride a 
 horse, and extreme positions were taken with regard 
 to the use of arms. In the great struggle between 
 the Jews and their Grseco-Syrian oppressors in the 
 time of the Maccabees, there were men who stood 
 so sternly on the law of abstinence from work that 
 they preferred to let themselves be cut off to a man 
 rather than handle the sword on the Sabbath. 
 Hostile powers were quick to see the advantage of 
 attacking the Jews on their Day of Rest. The 
 dangers of this rigid construction of the Sabbath-law 
 led to its being declared allowable to fight in self- 
 defence, though not otherwise, on the Sabbath. But 
 the prevailing feeling on the subject was so impractic¬ 
 able, that the Romans found it necessary to relieve 
 the Jews from military service. In this way the Old 
 Testament Day of Rest had, to a large extent, been 
 turned into one of the “ heavy burdens and grievous 
 to be borne ” of which our Lord speaks (Matt, xxiii. 4), 
 and its Divine purpose was lost in an intolerable 
 confusion of lawyer’s refinements and the mere 
 externals of its observance. 
 
 51. THE SABBATH OF THE NEW TESTA¬ 
 MENT; THE GOSPELS (Matt. xxiv. 20; John 
 
88 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 xix. 31 ; Luke xxiii. 54).—When Christ came the 
 Sabbath of the Ten Words had been reduced to 
 this Sabbath of the Scribes, and the commandment 
 of God had been made of none effect by the tradi¬ 
 tion of men. It was our Lord’s object in many of 
 His words and works to relieve the Sabbath from 
 the deadening pressure of Pharisaic formalism and 
 sophistry, to restore the Day of Rest to what God 
 meant it to be, and to carry its Divine idea to its 
 highest and most spiritual fulfilment. In this He 
 was often brought into collision with the professional 
 teachers and guardians of the Law, and so we have 
 frequent references to the Sabbath in the Gospels. 
 These show us both how the institution was re¬ 
 garded at the time by the different classes of the 
 Jewish people and what it was to Christ Himself. 
 With respect to the former, the perverted-, slavish, 
 unspiritual doctrine of the Sabbath which was taught 
 by the Scribes and adhered to with an ostentatious 
 rigidity by the Pharisaic class, appears on many 
 occasions, especially, as we shall see, in connection 
 with certain of our Lord’s works of healing. Other 
 things give us some insight into popular feeling on 
 the subject and into existing Sabbatarian regula¬ 
 tions. Thus, in his narrative of the discourse on 
 the approaching destruction of Jerusalem, Matthew 
 records Christ to have said, “ But pray ye that your 
 flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath- 
 day” (Matt. xxiv. 20). The first Gospel, the dis¬ 
 tinctively Hebrew Gospel, is the only one of the 
 three Synoptists that preserves these words “on 
 the sabbath-day” ; and the notice implies that the 
 restrictions on moving from place to place and 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 89 
 
 passing within or without cities were in full force. 
 Unbending observers of the Sabbath-law as inter¬ 
 preted by the Scribes had cause to pray that the 
 impending calamity might not befall them on that 
 day. Their own scrupulosities on the length of a 
 Sabbath-day’s journey and the stringent ordinances 
 on the shutting of the gates of cities, would bar 
 their flight on that day. The mention of the day 
 of “ the preparation,” that is, the day immediately 
 preceding the Sabbath and preparing for its solemn 
 observance, witnesses to the sanctity in which it 
 was held. John records the appeal of the Jews to 
 Pilate to have the bodies removed from the Cross, 
 because it was “ the preparation.” By the Law of 
 Deuteronomy (xxi. 22, 23), it was provided that the 
 body of a crucified offender should not hang all 
 night upon the tree. In the case of our Lord and 
 His companions in death, these Jews were the more 
 anxious to see the bodies taken away, because the 
 Sabbath which was approaching was one of double 
 sacredness, being not only an ordinary Sabbath, 
 but the first day of Passover, which also was a Sab¬ 
 bath (John xix. 31). And when Luke narrates how 
 Joseph of Arimathea obtained our Lord’s body 
 from Pilate, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in 
 the rock-hewn sepulchre, “wherein never man before 
 was laid,” he adds that “ that day was the prepara¬ 
 tion, and the sabbath drew on” (Luke xxiii. 53, 54). 
 
 52. CHRIST’S OWN ATTITUDE TO THE 
 SABBATH (Matt. v. 17 ; Luke iv. 16-32 ; Mark vi. 
 !_6).—In the Sermon on the Mount our Lord ex¬ 
 plained what He was to be in relation to the ancient 
 religion of Israel in these terms, “Think not that 
 
90 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 I am come to destroy the law or the prophets : I 
 am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matt. v. 17). 
 This was the principle at once of His action and of 
 His teaching in the matter of the Sabbath. He 
 honoured it for what it was designed to be, and 
 had a Son’s regard for it, and for every ordinance 
 of Israel which expressed His Father’s will. As 
 He was found in the Temple about His Father’s 
 business at the age of twelve, so in after years He 
 was no stranger to the synagogue, the place of 
 worship, on the Sabbath-day. At the beginning 
 of His public work, when He returned to Nazareth 
 after His ministry in Judaea and His journey through 
 Samaria, “He went into the synagogue on the 
 sabbath-day and stood up for to read.” The third 
 Evangelist, in recording this, states at the same 
 time that Jesus did this “as His custom was.” 
 From this we gather that before this time He was 
 in the habit of joining in the services of the Syna¬ 
 gogue on the Sabbath, taking part, perhaps, in the 
 prayers and the Scripture-readings. On this occa¬ 
 sion He expressed His wish to address the congre¬ 
 gation ; and having the Scriptures handed to Him, 
 He preached. Thus it was on a Sabbath, and in 
 the course of the usual public worship, that He 
 made His first distinct statement to His own 
 people of His claims to be their Messiah (Luke iv.). 
 At a later date He made another visit to Nazareth, 
 not alone, as on the earlier occasion, but in the 
 company of His disciples, and with a fame now 
 spread throughout the land as a prophet. And on 
 this occasion, too, it is reported that “ when the 
 sabbath-day was come, He began to teach in the 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 9i 
 
 synagogue” (Mark vi. 2 ; cf Matt. xiii. 54). And 
 at various points in His ministry the Gospels call 
 attention to His practice in this matter, apart from 
 what we shall see in their narratives of His miracles. 
 They tell us that, when He “returned in the power 
 of the Spirit into Galilee” after His temptation, “ He 
 taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all” 
 (Luke iv. 14, 15); that after His retreat to “the 
 desert place,” He “ preached in all the synagogues 
 of Galilee ” (Luke iv. 44) ; that after the Call of the 
 disciples by the sea, He “ went about all Galilee, 
 teaching in their synagogues” (Matt. iv. 23 ; Mark 
 i. 39 ; Luke xiii. 10) ; that during His third circuit 
 in Northern Israel He “went about all the cities 
 and villages, teaching in their synagogues ” (Matt, 
 ix. 35) ; that in presence of the High Priest He 
 appealed to the fact that He “ ever taught in the 
 synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews 
 always resort” (John xviii. 20). So He honoured 
 the ordinances of worship and joined Himself with 
 the congregation at the stated times of service. In 
 all His life nothing was watched with more jealous 
 or suspicious vigilance than His observance of the 
 Sabbath. And in all that was done to find in Him 
 something worthy of condemnation in this matter, 
 no breach of the Sabbath of the Ten Words could 
 be alleged against Him, nor any disregard of its 
 Divine purpose. 
 
 53. CHRIST AND THE SABBATH OF THE 
 SCRIBES (Matt. xii. 1, 2 ; Mark ii. 23, 24 ; Luke vi.. 
 i, 2 ).—Our Lord’s method of keeping the Sabbath, 
 however, was unlike that of the Scribes, and excited 
 their bitterest hostility. Because it was in accord- 
 
9 2 
 
 THE SABBATH 
 
 ance with the Divine idea of the ordinance, it was 
 in conflict with the unauthorised additions, pedantic 
 rules, and meaningless distinctions by which a de¬ 
 cadent Judaism had stripped it of its grace and 
 spiritual worth. Things which He did or allowed 
 to be done on the Sabbath were turned by the 
 Pharisees into charges of Sabbath desecration. In 
 meeting these charges He stated great principles 
 which lie at the basis of the whole law of a Day 
 of Rest, especially in its New Testament form. 
 The things chiefly resented by those superficial 
 Jewish religionists were works which He Himself 
 did on the day, and we have a series of Sabbath- 
 day miracles of healing which excited the bitterest 
 animosity of the Scribes and their party. But 
 things of a different kind, which He permitted His 
 disciples to do unchecked, were also made matter 
 of offence. We have an instance of the latter in 
 the narrative of the Plucking of the Ears of Corn, 
 which is given by all the three Synoptists. While 
 on a certain Sabbath-day Jesus and His disciples 
 were walking through certain cornfields in the neigh¬ 
 bourhood of Capernaum, as it appears, the latter 
 being hungry began to pluck and eat the ripe ears. 
 In itself this was quite an allowable thing. The 
 law of Deuteronomy, which forbade one to use the 
 sickle on his neighbour’s standing corn, expressly 
 permitted him to pluck the ears with his hand 
 (Deut. xxiii. 25). But Rabbinical refinements had 
 pronounced this permission void on the Sabbath. 
 Ploughing and reaping were among the works for¬ 
 bidden on the seventh day by the Law (Exod. 
 xxxiv. 21); and the misdirected genius of the 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 93 
 
 Scribes, setting itself to define the precise appli¬ 
 cation of this prohibition, had declared that gather¬ 
 ing a few ears of corn amounted to reaping. For 
 this reason the Pharisees objected to our Lord’s 
 allowance of this act on the part of His disciples 
 as a tacit approval of a breach of the Sabbath-law. 
 
 54. CHRIST'S REFUTATION OF THE PHARI¬ 
 SAIC IDEA OF THE SABBATH (Matt. xii. 3-8; 
 Mark ii. 25-28 ; Luke vi. 3-5).—Our Lord met these 
 objections with a fourfold reply. First, He pointed 
 His accusers to the testimony of the history of 
 Israel, which was sacred to them, reminding them 
 that even the shewbread which could lawfully be 
 eaten only by the priests, had been eaten by their 
 own King David and his men in their hunger. So 
 He stated the principle that the lower law of ordin¬ 
 ances must yield to the higher law of necessity. In 
 the second place He recalled the fact that even this 
 sacred law of the seventh-day Rest was not wholly 
 without qualification in the Mosaic legislation, the 
 priests being allowed to engage in the work which 
 was required for the Temple services. In the third 
 place He affirmed the great principles, which the 
 teaching of their own Prophets and Psalmists should 
 have made familiar to them, that mercy is God’s 
 desire and not mere sacrifice, that the grace of the 
 inner life is more than formal obedience to positive 
 statutes, and moral duties more than ceremonial. 
 Finally, as the first three Evangelists agree in 
 stating, He asserted His own lordship over the 
 Sabbath ; and this, as Mark records, on the ground 
 that the Sabbath was made for man and that He 
 was Himself the Son of man. In this great state- 
 
94 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 ment He re-affirmed the original purpose of the 
 Sabbath, and declared the source and limit of the 
 authority which was proper to it; which things had 
 been misinterpreted and perverted by the Scribes. 
 In their hands it had become an external ordinance 
 demanding a painful, mechanical observance. They 
 had dealt with it as if man had been made for its 
 sake, second to it, subject to it, its tool and slave. 
 But the Sabbath had been made for man’s sake and 
 his interest, with a view to his highest good, physical 
 and moral. Nothing inconsistent with this could 
 belong to the Sabbath as ordained of God. It was 
 meant to be man’s minister for good, not his sove¬ 
 reign. , It could not be superior, therefore, to the 
 Son of man—to Him who was the representative 
 Man, the One in whom the Divine idea of Man was 
 made good ; He was lord over the Sabbath, with 
 authority to make it fulfil God’s purpose in it and 
 minister anew to man’s good. And nothing done 
 by His disciples under His authority could be a 
 desecration of the Sabbath, as the Pharisees vainly 
 imagined. 
 
 55. THE FIRST SABBATH MIRACLES (Matt, 
 viii. 14-17; Marki. 21-34; Luke iv. 31-41).—Things 
 which Christ Himself did, however, on the Sabbath 
 were the greatest offence. N othing more exasperated 
 the Scribes than His works of healing on that day. 
 The first of the series recorded in the Gospels took 
 place in the synagogue of Capernaum on the Sabbath 
 immediately following the Call of the four disciples. 
 It was the cure of a man afflicted by the terrible and 
 mysterious malady of demoniacal,possession (Mark 
 i. 21-28 ; Luke iv. 31-37). The second occurred in a 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 95 
 
 private house after the synagogue service was over. 
 It was the complete and immediate restoration of 
 Peter’s mother-in-law, who had been prostrate with 
 an acute fever (Matt. viii. 14, 15 ; Mark i. 29-31 ; 
 Luke iv. 38, 39). On neither of these occasions 
 is it said that the healing work was made the sub¬ 
 ject of reproach or attack. The impression pro¬ 
 duced was amazement, and the spreading of the 
 fame of Jesus through all the surrounding districts. 
 But the scrupulosity of the J ews in the matter of the 
 Sabbath appears in the following statement, that 
 it was only when “even was come” and “the sun 
 did set,” that the people ventured to bring the 
 multitudes of their diseased and possessed for the 
 great Healer to attend to them. For the Sabbath 
 was regarded as over when the sun came to set, 
 and the Jew then felt himself free of the traditional 
 restrictions (Matt. viii. 16, 17 , Mark i. 32-34 ; Luke 
 iv. 40, 41). 
 
 56. THE SABBATH MIRACLE AT THE POOL 
 OF BETHESDA (John v. 1-18). —It was different 
 with other works of healing which were done after 
 this date. The scene of what appears to have been 
 the first of these later works was Jerusalem itself. 
 Jesus had gone up from Galilee to keep one of the 
 stated Jewish Feasts in the capital. He found a 
 crowd of ailing folk lying in the porches of the Pool 
 of Bethesda, waiting for the troubling of the water. 
 One of these sufferers, a man who had been ill for 
 thirty-eight long years, roused His special com¬ 
 passion. He healed the man and at the same time 
 bade him take up his bed and walk. The thing 
 thus done on the Sabbath was held to be a double 
 
96 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 offence, itself a work inconsistent with the law of 
 Rest, and the cause of a work, the carrying of the 
 bed, equally at variance with the traditional pre¬ 
 scription. For the Scribes had declared that to 
 carry so much as the smallest piece of parchment or 
 any garment not making part of one’s necessary 
 clothing amounted to “work” forbidden by the 
 Law. This deed of mercy roused the deadly 
 hostility of the official Jews, so that they did “per¬ 
 secute Jesus, and sought to slay Him” (John v. 16). 
 Their murderous enmity was made the more intense 
 by the answer which He gave them—“ My Father 
 worketh hitherto, and I work” (John v. 17). In 
 these majestic words He at once asserted His own 
 Divine Sonship with all the authority belonging to 
 that, and proclaimed His deed to be one after the 
 Divine order. His argument is that “ He is no more 
 a breaker of the Sabbath than God is, when He 
 upholds with an energy that knows no pause, the 
 work of His creation from hour to hour and from 
 moment to moment” (Trench). His Father is 
 working even until novo (as the R.V. gives it). His 
 creative Rest is a Rest under which He has always 
 been working, and still continues to work, in pro¬ 
 vidence and in grace, for man’s good. In this, as in 
 all things, it is for the Son to do as the Father, and 
 nothing that is done in conformity to the Father’s 
 example and the Father’s benignant purpose can be 
 inconsistent with the law of His Sabbath. 
 
 57. SABBATH MIRACLES IN GALILEE AND 
 JERUSALEM (Matt. xii. 9-14 ; Mark iii. 1-6 ; Luke 
 vi. 6-11 ; John ix. 1-41).—Another occasion of offence 
 arose in one of the synagogues of Galilee, probab’y 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 97 
 
 that of Capernaum. It occurred soon after the incid¬ 
 ent of the Plucking of the Ears of Corn, on a Sabbath 
 not far removed, if not on the very next Sabbath. The 
 case of a man with a withered hand appealed to His 
 pity, and He restored the lost vital power. It would 
 seem as if the Pharisees had reckoned on His not 
 being able to resist the sight of such suffering, and 
 were there in order to have the opportunity of 
 bringing him before the local court of justice. 
 Their charge would be based on the Rabbinical 
 prescriptions as to the extent to which the physician’s 
 work was allowable on the Sabbath. It had been 
 declared that medical aid could be given only when 
 life was in danger. Fractures, sprains, and maladies 
 like the one in question, therefore, could not be 
 lawfully healed on the Day of Rest. Christ, know¬ 
 ing the casuistries in which these men took refuge, 
 met them with a personal question—How would 
 one of themselves act if a sheep of his fell into a 
 pit on the Sabbath ? The question implied that it 
 was regarded then as no breach of the law to lift 
 the animal out; although, at a later date, scruples 
 seem to have been entertained as to whether one 
 could do more than supply the creature with food 
 and defer its rescue till the day was done. So He 
 set aside their objections by showing them that 
 even their own practice in the case of dumb crea¬ 
 tures was a confession that to do things in them¬ 
 selves right and merciful could not be wrong on the 
 Sabbath day. Again, in Jerusalem, at a later stage 
 in His ministry, He sent a blind man to the Pool of 
 Siloam for healing on the Sabbath day, having first 
 made clay and opened his eyes (John ix. 1-14). 
 
 G 
 
98 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 These latter two acts were taken to be breaches of 
 the law. The Pharisees, however, before whom the 
 man was brought, were not all of one mind on the 
 subject. Some thought that Jesus could not be of 
 God, because He failed to keep the Sabbath after 
 their way. But others argued that such miracles 
 could not be done by one who was a sinner, thereby 
 confessing that such works were no transgressions 
 of the law. 
 
 58. SABBATH HEALINGS AT PLACES UN¬ 
 NAMED (Luke xiii. 10-17 ; xiv. 1-6).—In connection 
 with a number of incidents belonging to our Lord’s 
 journey through Peraea to Jerusalem, Luke relates 
 the case of a woman, bent and bowed by a malady 
 of eighteen years’ standing, whom He healed in an 
 unnamed synagogue on the Sabbath. The hard, 
 merciless protest of the ruler of the synagogue on 
 this occasion drew forth Christ’s severe rebuke of 
 the hypocrisy which denied relief to a suffering 
 woman on the Day of Rest and allowed it in the 
 case of a thirsty ox or ass (Luke xiii. 10-17). Along 
 with another series of incidents which may, perhaps, 
 belong to the time when He was journeying between 
 Jerusalem and the Jordan, the same Evangelist tells 
 of the cure of a dropsical man on the Sabbath. 
 Though the Jews cooked no food on the sacred 
 day, it was their custom to have a good table, and 
 to attend to the duties of hospitality. On this 
 occasion a Pharisee of distinction had invited our 
 Lord to meat with him, and as they sat at table 
 this afflicted man found his way in and was healed. 
 The lawyers and the Pharisees who had been on 
 the watch were met with the question whether they 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 99 
 
 held it lawful to heal on the Sabbath-day, and then 
 with the question whether they would not at once 
 pull their ox or their ass out of a pit on that day. 
 And to neither question could they give a reply. 
 So ended the last of the series of attempts recorded 
 by the Gospels to find occasion against Christ in 
 His works of healing on the Day of Rest. 
 
 59. THE FIRST TOKEN OF ANOTHER 
 SACRED DAY (Matt, xxviii. 1-10; Mark xvi. 
 1-14 ; Luke xxiii. 55-xxiv. 1-35 ; John xx. 1-25). 
 —Thus our Lord Himself honoured the Sabbath, 
 rescuing it at the same time from the perversions 
 of the Scribes, exhibiting it again as an ordinance of 
 grace and spirituality, and vindicating a liberty in the 
 use of it consistent with its nature as an ordinance 
 made for man. In His own use of it He appealed 
 to the Divine example, to the end for which it was 
 given, to the supreme law of mercy and good, to 
 the allowance made by the Law itself and acted on 
 by these degenerate Jews in works necessary to 
 the due performance of the rites of religion, as in 
 the case of the Temple services, and again in the 
 case of circumcision (John vii. 22). So to the end 
 of His ministry He honoured the Sabbath, and set 
 its Divine idea before the Jews in all its truth and 
 beauty. But when He finished His ministry in 
 death and rose again “according to the Spirit of 
 holiness” (Rom. i. 4), a new order entered, which 
 gave a new meaning to the ancient ordinance. 
 Our Lord lay in Joseph’s tomb under the power 
 of death during the Sabbath after His Passion. 
 It was “when the sabbath was past” (Mark xvi. 1), 
 “ in the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn to- 
 
IOO 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 ward the first day of the week,” that the holy women 
 who had “ rested the sabbath-day, according to the 
 commandment” (Luke xxiii. 55), came to the sepul¬ 
 chre with their spices (Matt, xxviii. 1). It was the 
 first day of the week, “ very early in the morning,” 
 that they found the stone rolled away, and the 
 tomb empty (Mark xvi. 2-4 ; Luke xxiv. 1-3 ; John 
 xx. 1, 2). And it was on the same day that the 
 Risen Lord appeared to them and to others (Matt, 
 xxviii. 8-10; Mark xvi. 9-14; Luke xxiv. 14-391 J ohn 
 xx. 11-20; 1 Cor. xv. 5). The Resurrection of 
 Christ was the beginning of a new order which, 
 while preserving and enlarging the purpose of the 
 institution, in time connected it with another day 
 of the week. 
 
 60. THE SABBATH IN THE BOOK OF ACTS 
 
 (Acts xiii. 14, 27, 42, 44 5 xv. 21 ; xvi. 13 ; xvii. 2 ; 
 xviii. 4). —In the history of the planting of the 
 Church by the Apostles after Christ’s Ascension, 
 the Sabbath is but seldom mentioned. We see, 
 however, from the Book of Acts how Paul joined 
 in the services of the synagogue on the sacred day, 
 and took occasion to preach to the Jews as they 
 were met for worship. We find him, as has been 
 indicated above, in the synagogue of the Pisidian 
 Antioch on the Sabbath, discoursing of the resur¬ 
 rection of Christ (Acts xiii. 15). The impression 
 produced upon the Gentiles was so great that they 
 besought him to preach to them again the next 
 Sabbath, and on that day he had “ about the whole 
 city” assembled to “hear the word of God” (Acts 
 xiii. 42, 44). On the Sabbath also at Philippi, he 
 “went out of the city by a river, where prayer 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 IOI 
 
 was wont to be made,” and in the quiet of the spot, 
 declared the counsel of God to the devout women 
 (Acts xvi. 13). In Thessalonica, too, and in Corinth 
 he reasoned with Jews and Greeks in the synagogue 
 on the Sabbaths (Acts xvii. 2 ; xviii. 4). But apart 
 from these references to the Jewish custom, the 
 Sabbath does not definitely appear in this history 
 of the early days of the Church. As the first con¬ 
 verts, however, and the Apostles themselves, are 
 seen to have continued to attend the devotional 
 services of the Temple (Acts ii. 46 ; iii. 1), we may 
 conclude that the Sabbath also continued to be 
 observed by the Jewish Christians. 
 
 61. THE SABBATH IN THE EPISTLES (Heb. 
 iv. 9).—Still scantier mention is made of the Sabbath 
 in the other books of the New Testament. It is no¬ 
 where named in the Book of Revelation. Even in 
 the Epistles there are but two passages in which it 
 appears, and there it is only in the background. 
 One is the passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 on the “sabbath rest” (R. V.) that “remaineth for 
 the people of God” (iv. 9). The author of this 
 great Epistle speaks of the purpose of God 
 that men should enter into His Rest. He says 
 that Israel missed the blessedness of this Rest 
 through their unbelief, but that God’s purpose 
 stands, and there is therefore yet a “ Sabbatism,” a 
 Sabbath-keeping for His people. That Sabbath- 
 rest, into which it is still God’s will that man 
 should come, is the salvation which Christ has 
 brought to humanity. Here, then, the reference 
 to the Sabbath-ordinance is indirect and figurative. 
 But it indicates what the institution was to devout 
 
102 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 and spiritual minds, if it could be used as a figure of 
 the rest which God has promised to Christian men 
 through the revelation of His Son. The joy of the 
 fellowship which we have with God through Christ, 
 the life of perfect satisfaction and blessed realisation 
 which is promised us, this is described in terms of 
 an ideal Sabbath-keeping. 
 
 62. THE SABBATH IN THE EPISTLES (Col. 
 ii. 16).—The other passage is in the great argument 
 and protestation of the Epistle to the Colossians, 
 in which Paul expresses his longing to see the 
 Christians of Colossae building themselves up more 
 and more on Christ, and putting from them all en¬ 
 ticements to trust the traditions of men and pre¬ 
 tentious philosophies. They were in danger of being 
 drawn away into a form of religion which made 
 everything of ordinances, of going back to Mosaic 
 distinctions which had served their purpose and 
 had given place to something better,—distinctions 
 between meats and drinks which were lawful to use 
 and others which it was a point of religion not to 
 touch. Paul warns them that to yield to this was 
 to mistake the Gospel, to part with their liberty, 
 and to relapse into a religion for children. He 
 charges them to let no one put a yoke upon them 
 which Christ did not impose. Christ Himself 
 had given indication of the abrogation of these 
 distinctions (Mark vii. 14-23), and the same 
 had been revealed to Peter (Acts x. 9-16). As 
 it was with these old Jewish distinctions of clean 
 and unclean, so was it with the old Jewish times , 
 whether annual, or monthly, or weekly, whether 
 Feasts, or new moons, or Sabbath-days. They were 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 103 
 
 to allow no one to judge them in these things, 
 neither should they keep them in a slavish, Judaic 
 spirit. The passage, therefore, is of the same 
 class as those in Romans (xiv. 5*6) and Galatians 
 (iv. 9-11), in which Paul speaks of different de¬ 
 grees of faith and knowledge in the use of sacred 
 days, and of the danger of going back to the Jewish 
 use of set times. It discountenances an ascetic, 
 legal idea of the Sabbath and similar ordinances, as 
 if they and not Christ were the life and the sub¬ 
 stance of religion. It means that the place of such 
 things is not what it was under the Old Testament. 
 But it does not mean that the Sabbath-institution is 
 abrogated in principle, or that there is no place for 
 the Day of Rest in the religion of Christ. 
 
 63. THE NEW DAY OF REST (Matt, xxviii. 1 ; 
 Mark xvi. 2 ; Luke xxiv. 1 ; John xx. 1, 19, 26 ; 
 Acts ii. 1-4 ; xx. 7 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 2 ; Revel, i. 10).— 
 Meantime another day had become one of sacred 
 use and meaning, special consecration, and holiest 
 commemorative purpose. And this day was to 
 take the place of the Jewish seventh-day Sabbath 
 as the Christian Day of Rest. The first day of the 
 week, as all the evangelists agree in stating, was the 
 day on which Christ rose from the dead. It was the 
 day on which the Risen Lord made Himself known 
 to Mary and the holy women (Matt, xxviii. 1 ; Mark 
 xvi. 1-2, 9 ; Luke xxiv. 1, 10 ; John xx. 1, n-18) ; to 
 Peter (Luke xxiv. 34); to the two on the way to 
 Emmaus (Luke xxiv. 13). It was on the evening of 
 this day that He first appeared among the Apostles 
 (John xx. 19, 24), and it was on the same day a week 
 later that He appeared a second time among the 
 
104 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 same and relieved Thomas of his doubt (John xx. 
 26). On the Day of Pentecost following the Ascen¬ 
 sion His disciples received the gift of the Spirit, 
 which marked the birth-day of the Christian Church, 
 and it has been a question whether that momentous 
 Pentecost fell on a Tewish Sabbath or on the first 
 day of the week. It has been an old and general 
 opinion that the latter was the case, and if this 
 conclusion is right, we should have another reason 
 for the passing of the Day of Rest under the 
 Christian religion from the last to the first of the 
 week (Acts ii. 1-4). There are also other intima¬ 
 tions within the New Testament that this day had 
 a significance and a sanctity beyond all others, and 
 was specially consecrated to worship and religious 
 use. It was on “the first day of the week,” that 
 the disciples in Troas “came together to break 
 bread,” and heard Paul preach (Acts xx. 7). It 
 was “ upon the first day of the week,” too, that Paul 
 instructed the Corinthian Christians every one of 
 them to “lay by him in store, as God hath pros¬ 
 pered him” (1 Cor. xvi. 2). These passages in¬ 
 dicate that under the ministry of the Apostles the 
 first day of the week was recognised as a day for 
 stated religious worship, for preaching, and for giv¬ 
 ing. The exhortation in the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 (x. 25), as to “ not forsaking the assembling of our¬ 
 selves together,” may point in the same direction. 
 For, though it mentions no particular time, it seems 
 to imply the existence of a regular day for this 
 congregational purpose, and that day would most 
 probably be the one elsewhere noticed in a similar 
 connection. Further, when John speaks of being 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 io 5 
 
 “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” (Rev. i. 10), 
 he appears to refer to the first day of the week, 
 and to that as a sacred day. It is said, indeed, 
 that the Jewish Sabbath, or Easter Sunday, or the 
 day of Christ’s Second Advent, may be in view. 
 But if the seventh day had been intended, it would 
 have been natural to use its accepted name ; whether 
 Christ’s Resurrection was to be celebrated on the 
 anniversary of the event was not settled at once ; 
 and the expression used here “the Lord’s Day” (the 
 Dominical Day, as it might be rendered), is different 
 from “ the Day of the Lord,” which is the Biblical 
 phrase for the Second Advent or Last Judgment. 
 The reasonable conclusion, therefore, is that John 
 speaks of the first day of the week, and of it as a 
 day of commemorative significance and religious use. 
 The New Testament thus gives us to understand 
 that in the time of the Apostles, and in their practice 
 if not by their prescription, the first day of the 
 week was consecrated to religious observance. It 
 shows at the same time that Jewish Christians 
 did not break away at once from the wonted 
 services in the Temple. It would appear, there¬ 
 fore, that at this period, while it might be other¬ 
 wise within the circle of Gentile Christianity, the 
 Jewish Sabbath and the Lord’s Day were both 
 observed, though in different ways and measures, 
 within that of Jewish Christianity. 
 
 64. SABBATH AND LORD’S DAY IN POST- 
 APOSTOLIC TIMES.— The literature of the period 
 immediately succeeding that of the Apostles shows 
 that the two days stood in a manner side by side for 
 a length of time. The seventh day continued to be 
 
io6 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 observed, for the most part as a festal day, but by 
 certain Western Churches, especially that of Rome, 
 as a fast day. But the religious use of the Lord’s Day 
 is witnessed to in the very earliest writings. The in¬ 
 teresting book, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, 
 which was discovered quite recently, and which 
 belongs in all probability to the close of the first 
 century, speaks of it, under the peculiar and solemn 
 name of “ The Lord’s Day of the Lord,” or “ The 
 Dominical Day of the Lord,” as a day on which 
 Christians were to “ come together, and break bread, 
 and give thanks ” and confess their transgressions. 
 The author of the Epistle of Barnabas, dating about 
 the beginning of the second century, says of it “ We 
 celebrate the eighth day with joy, on which Jesus 
 rose from the dead.” Justin Martyr, who flourished 
 about 140 A.D., tells us that “on the day called 
 Sunday is an assembly of all who live either in the 
 cities or in rural districts, and the memoirs of the 
 Apostles and the writings of the Prophets are read.” 
 And the Roman writer Pliny, the Governor of the 
 Province of Bithynia, in his letter to the Emperor 
 Trajan, reports the Christians as “accustomed to 
 assemble together on a stated day, before it was 
 light, and to sing hymns to Christ as a God.” But 
 in course of time, as the Judaistic idea of the Day 
 of Rest sharpened and its pressure was felt by 
 Gentile Christians, a clear distinction was drawn 
 between the seventh day and the first, and the 
 Lord’s Day was separated from the Jewish Sabbath. 
 So the great African Father, Tertullian of Carthage, 
 in the early part of the third century, declared that 
 Christians had “nothing to do with Sabbaths, new 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 107 
 
 moons, or the Jewish festivals, much less with those 
 of the heathen,” but had their “own solemnities, 
 the Lord’s Day for instance, and Pentecost.” The 
 observance of the seventh day thus gradually ceased 
 even among Jewish Christians. The Emperor Con¬ 
 stantine, by his famous Edict of the year 321 A.D., 
 enacted that “ on the venerable day of the Sun,” 
 while persons engaged in the work of cultivation 
 were to have liberty, magistrates and people resid¬ 
 ing in the cities were to rest, and all workshops to 
 be closed. And the Council of Laodicea, about 
 363 A.D., forbade Christians to Judaize by abstin¬ 
 ence from work on the seventh day, and instructed 
 them to honour the Lord’s Day, and to rest as 
 Christians. 
 
 65. THE CHRISTIAN OBLIGATION OF THE 
 DAY.—The history of the ordinance and law of the 
 Day of Rest, as it lies beneath our eye in the 
 Scriptures, is the best interpretation of the purpose 
 of the institution, and its best defence. The experi¬ 
 ence of what it has been to the home, the Church, 
 and the nation, is the seal of its sanctity. And its 
 authority remains under the Christian law of liberty. 
 The duty of the religious observance of the Lord’s 
 Day has been asserted in different ways. Some 
 have based it on the uncertain ground of Ecclesi¬ 
 astical authority , reckoning it enough to say that 
 the Church has a right to establish this ordinance 
 as well as others. Some have founded it on 
 Apostolic authority , supposing that, in the exercise 
 of the commission received from Christ, Peter and 
 the others gave to the first day of the week the 
 place assigned of old to the seventh. Some have 
 
io8 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 held it to be a primeval institution of God, which 
 assumed a particular form under the Mosaic Law, 
 but continued in authority after that as before it. 
 Its broad foundations in any case are in these two 
 things, the Moral Law and our Lord’s Words. The 
 Mosaic Sabbath in its Jewish form has been re¬ 
 placed by the Lord’s Day. But it is not that the 
 Sabbath is simply abolished. That would be incon¬ 
 sistent with Christ’s claim, which was not to destroy 
 but to fulfil , by giving a more perfect embodiment 
 of the Divine idea of the institution, a higher and 
 more spiritual realisation of its purpose. Nor is it 
 that the Fourth Commandment ceases to bind us, 
 though in it as in the Fifth there is something which 
 belongs to a Dispensation of religion which has 
 given place to a higher. The Ten Words embody¬ 
 ing the Moral Law remain the rule of the Christian 
 life, to be kept according to the Spirit and by the 
 grace of the Spirit. And the principle of this Fourth 
 Commandment, which is in the heart of the Ten 
 Words, is embodied now in the Lord’s Day. No 
 word of Christ, no decree of the Apostles, is on 
 record abrogating the seventh day and appointing 
 the first. Rather was it by a gradual way, under the 
 sense of a Divine propriety and the suggestions of 
 Apostolic practice, that the Old Testament Rest of 
 the seventh day passed into the New Testament 
 Rest of the first day. The Lord’s Day has been 
 described, therefore, as “a projection within the 
 Christian Dispensation of the Law of the Jewish 
 Sabbath” (Rigg). The principle of the Day of 
 Rest, it has been well said, asserted once for all in 
 the Revelation to the Jews, “established itself by 
 
THE SABBATH. 
 
 109 
 
 the force of an inward law in the Christian Church ” 
 (Maurice). 
 
 66 . THE CHRISTIAN USE OF THE DAY.—The 
 
 New Testament gives no definite prescriptions for 
 the use of the Day. It leaves the Christian man to 
 honour it in consistency with its divine purpose, and 
 with the liberty of the Gospel. The spirit in which 
 it is to be used is stated thus by the great Puritan, 
 John Owen : “Although the day be wholly to be 
 dedicated unto the ends of a sacred rest. ... yet 
 duties, in their performance drawn out unto such a 
 length as to beget wearisomeness and satiety, tend 
 not unto edification, nor do in any way promote the 
 sanctification of the name of God in the worship 
 itself.” Robert Leighton, again, the saintly Bishop 
 of Dunblane, writes of it thus : “ They that under¬ 
 stand the true use of the holy rest of the Sabbath 
 day do know that it frees the soul, and makes it 
 vacant from earthly things for this purpose, that 
 it may fully apply itself to the worship and contem¬ 
 plation of God, and converse with Him at greater 
 length. Then certainly, where there is this entire 
 love to God this will not weigh heavy, will be no 
 grievous task to it; it will embrace and gladly obey 
 this Fourth Cojnmandment, not only as its duty, 
 but as its great delight. For there is nothing that 
 love rejoices in more than in the converse and society 
 of those on whom it is placed ; it would willingly 
 bestow most of its time that way, and thinks all 
 hours too short that are spent in that society. 
 Therefore not only they who profanely break, but 
 they who keep it heavily and wearily, who find it 
 rather a burthen than a delight, may justly suspect 
 
no 
 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 that the love of God is not in them ; but he that 
 keeps His day cheerfully, and loves it, because on it 
 he may more liberally solace and refresh himself in 
 God, may safely take it as an evidence of his love to 
 God.” And a noble preacher of our own century, 
 Frederick Robertson of Brighton, who stood on 
 different ground regarding the basis of the Day of 
 Rest, expresses himself in these terms : “ The need 
 of the Sabbath is deeply hidden in human nature. 
 He who can dispense with it must be holy and 
 spiritual indeed. And he who, still unholy and 
 unspiritual, would dispense with it, is a man who 
 would fain be wiser than his Maker. We, Christians 
 as we are, still need the law : both in its restraints, 
 and in its aids to our weakness. No man therefore, 
 who knows himself, but will gladly and joyfully use 
 the institution. No man who knows the need of his 
 brethren will wantonly desecrate it or recklessly 
 hurt even their scruples respecting its observance.” 
 
 TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH 
 
§ibk Class primers. 
 
 Continued. 
 
 LIFE OF MOSES. By Rev. Professor Iverach, M.A. 
 
 “Accurately done, clear, mature, and scholarly.’’— Christian. 
 
 LIFE OF ST JOHN. By Paton J. Gloag, D.D. 
 
 “ We commend this choice little work to our thoughtful readers. 
 
 —-Methodist S. S. Record. 
 
 LIFE OF PAUL. By Paton J. Gloag, D.D. 
 
 “ This little book could not well be surpassed,”— Daily Review. 
 
 LIFE AND REIGN OF SOLOMON. By Rev. Rayner 
 W lNTERBOTHAM, M.A., LL.B. 
 
 “ Every teacher should have it.”—Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION. By Rev. 
 Professor Witherow. 
 
 “A vast amount of information set forth in a clear and concise 
 manner.”— United Presbyterian Magazine. 
 
 THE KINGS OF ISRAEL. By Rev. W. Walker, M.A. 
 
 “ A masterpiece of lucid condensation.”— Christian Leader. 
 
 THE KINGS OF JUDAH. By Rev, Professor Given, 
 Ph.D. 
 
 “ Admirably arranged; the style is sufficiently simple and clear to 
 be quite within the compass of young people.”— British Messenger. 
 
 JOSHUA AND THE CONQUEST. By Rev. Professor 
 
 Croskery. 
 
 “This carefully written manual will be much appreciated.”— Daily 
 Review. ___ 
 
 THE SEVEN CHURCHES OF ASIA; or, The Seven Golden 
 Candlesticks. By the Author of “The Spanish 
 Brothers.” Cloth, Is. 
 
 BIBLE WORDS AND PHRASES, Explained and Illus¬ 
 trated. By Rev. Charles Michie, M.A. 18mo, 
 cloth, Is. 
 
 “Will be found interesting and instructive, and of the greatest 
 value to young students and teachers.” Athenceum. 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, 38 George Street, Edinburgh. 
 
Recently Published i ; : Third £dl, 
 
 Price 8$. 6d. 
 
 BEYOND THE 
 
 bbM§MM 
 
 ^^Ooctipatbfi^ 
 
 By T?BOMiiLm& M 
 
 Author of “History of the irhfa Pr&b, 
 
 CONTENTS.-^Chap. I. Some Introductory W< 
 of Localities. III. Tlie King of the Conn 
 . Minl^tere.The King*# He?is*!ttg.S3n8^ 
 j.octe, VII. The XittIe f)*®a in Heaven 
 one another in Heaven IX. Coram$& 
 
 Resurrection, XI. How to get there. 
 
 '■,^‘Tt is the wni&^ a man of strong sense and 
 thought and expression. . v . He puts hiraaei 
 , audience, and irt^^s whailm lias .ta ^p3k 
 
 ‘ 4 Dr Hamilton accepts the clear revelations of 
 
 consolatory, and altogether help¬ 
 ful viA\^Q.”~lhtpti&3tf<tgazine. 
 
 f::? 1 ji ii'jtf^i'ft' if 
 
 80 GREAT SALVATI 
 
 bit Rev. O. H. C. MACGREGOR, M.A., Aberdeen. 
 
 ^^Ms^ sSSiEKKmlm^ U^^ •':'. .#rrit . ?•':A:. ^gaaSaHBB 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY PRINCIPAL, MOULE, RfDLEY HaL£,. 
 
 “ if I have road It aright, there Is Indeed reason why I should be 
 glad. It is one of those books, never too common, In which, by the 
 grace of God, the message of a fall gospel is presented net-only 
 clearly, ;bat aympgihetieftlly ; rot only tenderly, but wasrcUUjgiy • 
 and above all, so as to bring out proportions and connections in 
 ; the .*•' -fUtmKtlofiii-? as they are revealed in the 
 
 Holy AF&d^^Fi incipal Moolis,