Look, again, at proud Nineveh. Why did she perish? The answer is found in the Divine declaration, “I will make thy grave, for thou art vile.” Yes, so deep did Jehovah dig the dishonoured grave of Nineveh, that only now, at the end of 2500 years, are her obelisks and winged lions—her idol gods of stone, and the engraved memorials of her battles, her sieges, and her victories, disentombed and brought to the light of day, to the confusion of the sceptic, and the confirmation of the “sure word of prophecy.”
And was it not so with Babylon—the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency—which God in his anger made as Sodom and Gomorrah—a solitary waste for owls to dwell therein, and dragons to cry in her pleasant palaces? And if Tyre, once the emporium of commerce, whose “merchants were princes,” and whose “traffickers were the honourable of the earth”—if she has now become a rock on which the fisherman dries his nets;—if the desolate caves and dwellings of Petra, like the eagle’s eyrie “in the sides of the rock,” tell of what Edom once was in the day of her glory and pride;—if the republics of Greece have long since perished under the fierce barbarism of their Moslem invaders;—if Carthage, despite the valour of her sons and the consummate skill of her accomplished chief, fell, trodden to the dust beneath the iron hoof of her victorious rival, Rome;—and if the colossal empire of Rome itself, then the mistress of the world, has crumbled into fragments, bequeathing to the genius of history such ample materials for the wondrous story of her “Decline and Fall;”—if Attila and Alaric were the scourges of God to hasten her downfall;—if, later still, France and Spain and the republics of Italy have been the scene of frightful convulsions and bloody wars, surely these impressive lessons were written on the page of the world’s annals to teach us the solemn truth, that God punishes guilty nations as such for the violation of his laws—that “verily there is a God who judgeth in the earth.”
II. If it be true, in a general sense, that the violation of the laws of God brings wrath upon a people, we have abundant evidence to show that the violation of the law of the Sabbath, in an especial and emphatic manner, provokes the Divine judgments. It was one of the crowning acts of Israel’s wickedness and apostasy that she had ceased to honour the day of God; and one of the causes of the Babylonish captivity was indicated in the awful charge, “My Sabbaths have they greatly polluted.” And so you find that when God assigns the period of Israel’s bondage in a strange land, by a strong figure He represents the very soil of Canaan as outraged by their past profanation of his holy day, and declares that the land should have her Sabbaths—(that was when the people should be carried away captive to Babylon)—“as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies’ land, then shall the land rest and enjoy her Sabbaths, because ye did not rest in your Sabbaths when ye dwelt upon it.” And how awful was the warning addressed to rebellious Israel by the mouth of Jeremiah: “But if ye will not hearken unto me to hallow the Sabbath day, and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath-day, then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched!” Is all this, I ask, an inexplicable mystery? Has it no instruction for us?—no application to the times in which we live—no voice of warning for our guidance? On the contrary, is it not clear that the fourth commandment in the moral law is what the keystone is to the arch—what the heart is to the bodily frame—what the foundation is to the building, that the observance of this commandment lies at the very basis of national morality and national greatness? And if it be wickedly violated, systematically, deliberately violated under the sanction of human authority, in direct defiance of Divine law, by any people, utter and irretrievable ruin must fall on that guilty nation; the Lord of Hosts will “break the pride of its power,” and bring a sword that shall “avenge the quarrel of his covenant!”
III. Closely connected with the profanation of this day by Israel was apostasy in religion. They departed from the cardinal truth of God’s unity to the worship of the “gods many and lords many” of the heathen nations around them. Thus, the sanctuary being forsaken and the Sabbath violated, they gave heed to the instruction of lying and wicked prophets, and a flood of ungodliness was poured all over the land. And even after their return from bondage, the leaven of their wickedness remained—idolatrous alliances, intermarriages with heathen nations, and other crimes, are connected in the sacred history with Sabbath profanation. Hence, Nehemiah, the bold Reformer, records how he contended with the people and even with the nobles of Judah, and how, testifying against their sin, he said unto them, “What evil thing is this ye do and profane the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers thus, and did not our God bring all this evil upon us and upon this city? Yet ye bring more wrath upon Israel by profaning the Sabbath.”
Now, it is precisely so with regard to the Christian Sabbath. A system of spurious Christianity has mutilated it by the sanction of secular occupations and sinful pleasures on that holy day. Romanism, in its ritual and service, is, in itself, a blasphemous worship—its mass idolatry—its priests usurpers of the prerogative of Christ, “the Great High Priest of our profession,” and teachers not of the Gospel of Christ, but of “another gospel”—the devotions of her people are not simple, spiritual, and Bible-taught, but the offspring of fear marked by superstition and self-righteousness, and by the vain repetition of prayers to those who are no more gods than were the dumb idols of ancient Paganism. But, in addition to this, Popery has made void the law of God, the law of the Sabbath, by her traditions, and that in two ways.—1st, She has dragged down this blessed day of God from that place of peculiar glory and grandeur, where Jehovah himself has enthroned it above every other day, and has degraded it to a level with the feasts and fasts of the Romish calendar, making her own numerous holidays of equal authority with the Holy Day of God’s appointment. The consequence is, that, in all Popish countries, the holidays are better observed than the Sabbath, just because superstition and will-worship are dear to the carnal heart.
2nd, She has robbed the law of God of its complete and permanent authority. She has contracted the Scriptural limits of the Sabbath, and made it a half instead of a whole Sabbath. Hence, when the Popish mass is over at noon, the remaining portion of the day is regarded as a holiday. I speak not here of countries like our own, where she accommodates herself to the religious feelings and habits of the community, but of countries where she holds paramount sway. There one-half of the Sabbath is devoted to amusement and sensuous, if not sensual enjoyment. Before famine and pestilence swept the neighbouring island as with “the besom of destruction,” crowds of the population might be found on the Sabbath playing at the game of football, wrestling in the meadow, or drinking and dancing in the public-house, whilst many of the priests were wont, as I have reason to know, to spend the evening of the Sabbath in gay society, and shared in card-playing and carousal. And when we look to France—the military review, the brilliant fête, the opening of a railway, take place on the Sabbath, while the population of Paris is divided between the attractions of Versailles, the Luxembourg, and the Louvre, and the numerous theatres which are thrown open by authority for those who are “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.”
If we go to Rome, the centre and source of that gigantic superstition which flings its dark shadows over the continent of Europe, we find public “lotteries” in active operation on the Sabbath, over which cardinals themselves preside. And in Madrid, after mass is over, the Queen of Spain, surrounded by multitudes of her people, is present at the cruel and revolting bull-fight.
And thus it is everywhere the spirit of Popery to mutilate the Sabbath. If it be said this laxity prevails also in Protestant countries of the continent, for this a twofold reason may be assigned:—first, because the German Reformers, not excepting Luther himself, gave an uncertain sound on the obligations of the Sabbath, and retained so much of the system they had abandoned as to leave to their countrymen a low and imperfect standard of Sabbath observance; and, above all, because the spirit of the Reformation is dead in Germany, Rationalism has taken the place of Evangelism, and “the salt has lost its savour.” It is encouraging to know that, wherever evangelical truth has been revived on the continent, there also is waking up a corresponding zeal for the sanctification of the Lord’s day.
Popery, then, has always robbed God of half his own day; and wherever this sacrilege is perpetrated, His judgments have been poured forth. As is attested by the history of Israel in the days of old, as well as by that of France, and Italy, and Spain, and of our own country in the days of the Stuarts, when semi-Popery tyrannised over its victims in the oppression and murder of the Covenanters of Scotland and of the Puritans of England, when the first Charles perished on the scaffold after long and bloody civil wars, and the second Charles, (whose personal profligacy almost corrupted a whole nation, and who, as Pepys so graphically records,) was smitten by the hand of death as he sat, surrounded by his paramours, at the gambling-table, on the Sabbath eve, in “that glorious gallery” of Whitehall Palace; in the judgments that came upon dynasties and nations, as such, at these and other periods in connexion with Sabbath desecration—we are forcibly reminded that the “Lord of the Sabbath day,” seated at the Father’s right hand, can, as the divine word so awfully expresses it, “strike through kings in the day of His wrath,” and “dash” His enemies “in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”
The whole Sabbath, then, belongs to God; we claim the whole of it for the concerns of the soul and of eternity, and any secular infringement of it must be an act of rebellion against the sovereignty of the Most High.