moved from the world and wrapt up in the contemplation of the Lord Jesus Christ on His own day, he calls by the name which had become usual in the Church to designate its divine origin and institution, "the Lord's Day." He himself was engaged on it,83 all solitary though he was, in thoughts and exercises, which, as they knit him to his absent brethren, so they joined him especially "to the general assembly and Church of the first-born which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant," not "to the mount which burned with fire," or the terrors with which the Mosaic Covenant and its institutions, Sabbatical or other, had been enforced upon the Jews of old.

But you will of course have observed two things. First, that the first day of the week has only arrived by degrees at the honor which we suppose the Apostles by divine direction to have assigned to it. Secondly, that as we have made no mention of the Sabbath, that institution must either have determined altogether, or have been transferred to the Lord's Day. As to the prevalence of the Lord's Day being only gradual,84 it is obvious to remark that it was only gradually that the Apostles developed other doctrines. They were as cautious in their constructive operations, as they were tender and considerate in those which were destructive. Besides, a religion just struggling into existence, and exposed to the enmity of the Jews and to the suspicions of the heathen, possessed of no public edifices, and therefore obliged long after this to hold its assemblies in private houses, in the open air, or even in deserted cemeteries, could not at once assume the regularity of a recognized or established creed.85 It is possible that the Christians were often obliged to intermit its observance for a while. So of old time, the periodical rest was occasionally intermitted, as when Jericho 86 was compassed about seven days. The usurping Queen, Athaliah,87 was

dethroned on the Sabbath Day. As to the determination of the Sabbath in the days of the Apostles, in one sense it had determined already. It was, as we shall show in a subsequent Lecture, part and parcel of the ceremonial and political law of the Jews, and died naturally when the ceremonies had been fulfilled in Christ, and the Jews, to whom it was a sign, had ceased to be peculiarly God's people. In another sense it lingered on for a while, though decreasing in honor and gradually less esteemed, as the Lord's Day increased in honor and became gradually more esteemed. Perhaps it was providentially arranged that it should not die out quite at once, in order that its diversity from the Lord's Day might be the better manifested. We have however to answer these questions concerning it. Were the obligations or rites connected with it transferred to the Lord's Day? or was any observance of a Sabbath, either on its own Day or on the Lord's Day, enjoined on Christians? And in whatever way these questions may be answered, a third must be answered also: How is the mention of the Sabbath in the New Testament at all, and the apparent respect paid to it by the Apostles, after the Resurrection, to be accounted for?

The replies may be made almost as concise as the questions. In no one place in the New Testament is there the slightest hint that the Lord's Day is a Sabbath, or that it is to be observed Sabbatically, or that its observance depends on the Fourth Commandment, or that the principle of the Sabbath is sufficiently carried out by one day in seven being consecrated to God. Whatever the Lord's Day had, was its own, not borrowed from the Sabbath, which was regarded for religious purposes as existing no longer. Nay more, when certain Judaizing persons had troubled the Church by insisting that the law of Moses was binding upon Gentile converts, the Apostles met in council. Their decision was that certain things should be abstained from

by the Gentiles, but they did not enjoin any positive ceremonial observance connected with the older Covenant, not even the Sabbath. And to this it should be added, that St. Paul in writing to the Colossians, (ii. 16), to the effect, that "the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us," was "blotted out by Christ," taken out of the way by Him," and "nailed by Him to His cross," subjoins this remarkable exemplification of his meaning: "Let no man, therefore, 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 of Christ." In writing to the Galatians (iv. 9, 10), he says in like manner, "Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain." No testimony can be more decisive than this to the fact that the Sabbath was of obligation no longer.

It has been urged here, that St. Paul is speaking only of the Sabbath as it existed among the Jews, or of their Sabbatical observances of which the Sabbath was only one, but that he did not intend to annul a Sabbath of more venerable antiquity,88 whose origin dates from the Creation. This is of course to assume a point which will be discussed hereafter, that the Sabbath existed as a practical ordinance before the time of Moses, and has claims upon us anterior to the Mosaical Law, and is not abolished with that law's abolition. At present I will merely say, this is only an assumption.

It has been urged again, that among the things to come. was the Lord's Day, and that the Sabbath, the shadow of it, virtually subsists in the Lord's Day.89 This is to assume the whole point at issue, and, as we shall show hereafter by the authority of Scripture and by other great though subordinate authorities, to mistake the typical object of the Sabbath.

It has been urged thirdly, that to adduce these passages is to prove too much; that they make the observance of all days, whether Christian or Jewish,90 either to be directly wrong, or to be a matter of indifference. This will be discussed also in its proper place.

Many passages, no doubt, occur in the Acts of the Apostles in which mention is made of the Sabbath. SS. Paul and Barnabas enter into the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia on the Sabbath Day. St. Paul speaks there of the prophets being read every Sabbath Day, in the course of his address to the people. He is asked to preach the same words to them on the next Sabbath. On the next Sabbath 91

e complies with this request. At Corinth he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath. At Philippi he resorted on the Sabbath to a Proseucha or Synagogue-chapel by the river-side. At Thessalonica he reasoned three Sabbath Days out of the Scriptures. But why was the Sabbath thus selected ?92 Simply because the persons to be converted in the first instance were Jews; because the Jews assembled on the Sabbath Day; and because, being assembled, they had those Scriptures before them out of which the preachers of the Gospel were to prove that He had come which should come. The Sabbath is only mentioned naturally and in the course of the narrative as the Day on which the Jews could be approached and were approached in masses. Not one word is said by St. Paul or by any of the Apostles in honor of the day, or in commendation of its observance. It is curious too that though at the Council of Jerusalem St. James used the expression," Moses is read in the Synagogue every Sabbath Day," and thus incidentally brought the subject before it, it was not thought desirable to place the observance of that Day even among the matters which should be conceded to Jewish prepossessions. Accordingly, though the Jewish converts still observed it, though even St. Paul, perhaps, observed it

occasionally, following the same rule of charitable allowance for his brethren's scruples that he did when he purified himself after the Jewish manner, and even circumcised Timothy, the son of a Jewish mother, and though, as we shall see presently, it dragged on a lingering existence for some time by the side of the Lord's Day, I think that the following propositions are at least tolerably clear;

That the Lord's Day, (a festival on the first day in each week), is indicated in the New Testament, and was observed by the Apostles and their immediate followers as distinct from the Sabbath, (a Jewish festival on the seventh day in each week), the obligation to observe which is denied both expressly and by implication in the New Testament. That being so acknowledged and observed by the Apostles and their immediate followers, it is of Divine institution, and so, in its essence, and in the circumstantials of it mentioned in Scripture, binding on the Church for

ever.

I have said, that these propositions are tolerably clear. They will, I think, be proved to demonstration by notices. to be found in writers of the next two centuries.93 From these it will appear that, as a matter of fact, in all places where Christianity was known, the same doctrine prevailed on this subject, not as requiring proof, but as a point which no one so much as thought of disputing.

Whether some moral consideration, which the Mosaical Law did not furnish for the first time, and which therefore survived its abolition, did not, from the nature of the case, constitute a reason for the institution of the Lord's Day which we are justified in finding if we can; and whether again the Mosaic Law, as one development of that moral consideration, was not, as in other matters, so in this, suggestive of something connected with it, are points which I reserve for the present. So far as we have gone, the