IV. The Sabbath law admits of no compromise either with the claims of covetousness on the one hand, or of sinful pleasure on the other. Not with covetousness, for it is written, “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” Often have such compromises been attempted by individuals and by communities, but upon them the God of heaven has ever frowned. Ye railway directors, who overwhelm with a storm of ridicule the faithful few who oppose the running of trains on the Sabbath day, what “fruit have ye had” even as to success in your speculations? Ye “looked for much, and lo! it came to little;” and “why?” saith the Lord of Hosts; “because I did blow upon it.” And are there now men who, while they call their palace “the people’s palace,” and themselves “the poor man’s friends,” yet depend mainly on the poor man’s shillings to swell their dividends? “O! my soul; come not thou into their secret, unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united!”
Neither, again, will this law of the Sabbath “shake hands” with those who “are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.” “From such” an inspired apostle commands us to “turn away.” If you consider a whole Sabbath spent devoutly “a weariness,” and say, “When will it be over?”—if you prove by your practice that your attendance on the sanctuary during one part of the Sabbath is regarded by you as a kind of licence to spend the rest of the day in “doing your own pleasure,” then be assured that you furnish a fearful evidence that you are destitute of the spiritual tastes of “the new creature,” and that you are still “in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity!” And let none say that we desire to make the Sabbath a day of gloom and not of gladness. We desire that it should be consecrated to that God whose “ways are pleasantness,” and because it is “the day which the Lord hath made” to exult in its refreshing remembrances, in its blessed privileges, and in its hallowed anticipations. And thus counting the Sabbath “A DELIGHT,” the Christian can exclaim,
“O day most calm and bright,
The fruit of this, the next world’s bud;
The endorsement of supreme delight
Writ by a Friend, and with his blood;
The couch of time; care’s balm and bay;
The week were dark but for thy light,
Thy torch doth show the way!”
V. There are pleas urged on behalf of this movement which demand our notice. It may be said that “there are already laws on the Statute Book which license the opening of public-houses, the running of railway trains and of steam-boats, and that the sale of Sunday newspapers, and of a host of penny publications, many of which are most noxious in their tendency, is also sanctioned.” We reply that all such laws are unholy, Popish and not Protestant in their spirit and tendency, and that they directly assail the authority and perpetual obligation of the Divine law which says, “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy.” It was in the true spirit of the Reformation that the Founders of the Church of England instructed the minister to rehearse publicly the fourth commandment, and the people to respond, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” It was not from Puritanical strictness or Scottish bigotry, so called, but because the Bible was their pole-star, and the glory of God their aim, that the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, in their “Shorter Catechism,” taught the child to say, “The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such recreations and employments as are lawful on other days, and the spending the whole time in the public and private exercise of God’s worship, except so much as shall be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy.”
But we may be told, again, that “the Sabbath is a Jewish institution.” We marvel that any should practically forget that the law of the Sabbath occupied a place on those tables of stone on which the Great Lawgiver inscribed a law with His own finger, which had nothing ceremonial, Jewish, or national in their aspect, which was constituted for all time, and which the Great Author of the New Testament dispensation declared that He “came not to destroy, but to fulfil.” No merely ceremonial institution, no “positive” and transitory law, could have had penalties so awful, or blessings so precious annexed to it, as we find attached to the Sabbath, and that before the advent of the Messiah, and throughout the whole course of Jewish national history. Born as the institution itself was, so to speak, in Paradise; recognised by patriarchs from Noah onward, as indicated by the division of time into weeks; lost and trampled down under the hoof of slavery in Egypt (as it has ever been where slavery has prevailed), but experiencing a resurrection in the wilderness, where Israel was free to serve and sacrifice, to worship and give praise to their fathers’ God—Sinai’s thunders but gave awful sanction and permanent establishment to a “law” which from the beginning had its moral claims over the whole race, and which, irrespective of all typical institutions, was intended for the race as such, and was thus emphatically “MADE FOR MAN.”
Under the Christian dispensation, the seventh portion of time is still consecrated to God, the change of the day but adding a higher and holier lustre and sanction to the Sabbath than it ever possessed before, because it commemorates the resurrection of Him by whom Paradise is to be restored, and who has declared from His throne, “Behold, I make all things new.” His own example and that of His Apostles, as well as of the churches formed by them, and the honour put on “the Queen of days” (as Justin Martyr calls it), by the primitive Church, reminds us that the Lord’s-day claims our homage, our devout and holy observance, too; and that just in proportion as we hallow it, shall we “sanctify the Lord God in our hearts,” and conform our practice to the pristine model of all that is “pure, and lovely, and of good report,” as well as bring down upon our families and upon our country the blessing of Him who is the Governor of nations. No human government, no earthly ruler, therefore, can set aside, or abrogate, or modify the requirements of this law, so as to limit its sacred hours virtually to the half of the scriptural standard, without pouring contempt on the very statute-book of Heaven!
It may be further said that, under the Gospel Dispensation, “the strictness of its observance is relaxed because capital punishment is not to be inflicted on its transgressors, as of old.” We reply that, in the instance cited, capital punishment was inflicted under a theocracy (by God Himself, as the Immediate Governor of Israel), and that this was an emblem of that sore and everlasting punishment—that death eternal, which will surely overtake the impenitent transgressors of the Sabbath.
Again: the apologist for the relaxation of Sabbath observance may take shelter under the authority of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and plead that we are free to act as we please, because Paul says, “One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” But we reply, that this passage has special reference to the feast days, which some Jewish converts to Christianity thought binding, and others did not; and which the Apostle, in a catholic spirit, left to the discretion of each individual, as conscience might dictate. In the same spirit he says to the Colossians, “Let no man judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath days, which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ.” Now, the Sabbath days here mentioned as not imperatively binding were the seventh-day Sabbaths, and not the first day of the week, the Christian Sabbath, commemorative of the New Creation, when God the Son finished the work of Redemption, as God the Father on the seventh day ended the works which He had made.
And here an objector may say, “if the command is to be strictly fulfilled, the seventh day should be observed.” That such an objection should be put forward by any professing Christian is indeed strange. For the change from the seventh to the first day of the week, we have the example of Christ and the Apostles, and the command is in spirit and in truth obeyed by dedicating to the service of God a seventh portion of time, that portion in the Christian Church being the first day of the week. In point of fact, it is impossible that identically the same hours can be set apart for Sabbath observance in every part of the world. The sun that sets on Calcutta rises on the towers of Quebec. If two ships leave England, and sail round the globe by different routes, they will have lost a day in their reckoning; the seventh day of the one will be the first of the other. But amidst these variations, arising from the earth’s motion, the Sabbath remains an immutable institute and ordinance of Heaven. It still continues of Divine authority and of perpetual obligation. Under the gospel it is accompanied with fresh claims on our reverence and regard, and it is set apart under the most solemn sanctions for the worship of Jehovah’s name.
Further, it may be pleaded that “it is unjust for those who have leisure and opportunity during the week, to object to the opening of the Crystal Palace on part of the Sabbath, while the masses have no other season for relaxation from daily toil, or for inspecting the wonders of nature and art.” Still we urge the command, “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy.” The day, the whole day, belongs to God; and he has solemnly said, “I hate robbery for burnt offering.” The Lord of the Sabbath day has declared that “the Sabbath was made for man”—yes, and emphatically for the poor man. It is his, as an immortal and responsible being, and his devout observance of it can alone make it to him a blessing and not a curse. It is thus that the poor of this world are to be made “rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which God hath promised to them that love Him.” In the estimate of God, one day in seven is not too much for either poor or rich to prepare for eternity.