The following references in the index, article Sabbat, will show sufficiently the author's opinions, and how he treats the subject. "The Sabbath-day was not sanctified before Moses, 40. Whether its observance is of all times? 104. Reasons of those who maintain its antiquity, 105. The Sabbath known and reverenced by all the Gentile nations, 105, 106, 116. The Romans looked upon it as an unlucky day, 107, 117. Reasons of those who deny its antiquity, 107. The law of the Sabbath was not given to Adam, 108. God gave the Sabbath to the Israelites for reasons which were good only in regard to them, 108, 109. Authorities and evidence against the antiquity of the Sabbath, 109, 113. The first Sabbath was celebrated in the wilderness, 110. Whether the Sabbath-day is the seventh day from the creation of the world, 110, 111. Examination of the words of Moses cited for the antiquity of the Sabbath, 118, 119. What was the covert of the Sabbath, spoken of in the book of Kings, 210. How the people were warned on the eve of the Sabbath to cease from work, 294. Of the service of the Sabbath, 324. Of the origin of the Sabbath, 352. Rules of its observance, 353. The Jews might defend themselves on it, 353. What was a Sabbath-day's journey, 353. Of the assemblies which were held on that day, 353. The Sabbath of years, 354. The great Sabbath of years, 358, et seq."

An English translation of the book was published at London in 1705; 2 vols. 8vo.

207. PLACETTE, JOHN LA, a French Protestant Divine, Pastor of a French Church at Copenhagen (born 1639; died 1718.)—Dissertations sur divers Sujets de Morale et de Theologie. Amst. 1704. 12mo. Pp. 376.

Of these dissertations the third and last is" Sur le Quatrième Commandement, et sur la manière en laquelle les Chrétiens doivent l'observer." (Pp. 285–376.)

In chapter 1. the writer inquires whether the Fourth Commandment enjoins six days' work as well as the seventh day's rest. He inclines to the affirmative answer; work being regarded as an imitation of God's creative labours, and hence religious in its character. But the question seems to him unimportant, since the duty of work has ample support otherwise, from Scripture and reason. Chapter 2. considers what it was that God required from the Israelites when he ordered them to sanctify the seventh day : As, in working six days, they were not bound to deny themselves sleep, nourishment, and necessary relaxation, so, he thinks, God did not mean the seventh day to be spent, without intermission, in pious exercises. The Sabbath-law, he maintains, related to Saturday, and not to any other day of the week. In chapter 3. he states the opinion, that the Israelites were required to sanctify

the seventh day by setting it apart as a day for certain religious services: 1. Those of the tabernacle and temple (Numb. xxviii. 9, 10); and, 2. Those of other places, viz., extraordinarily careful abstinence from sin, and the performance of acts of piety and holiness (Isa. i. 13, 14, 15; lvi. 1, 2; lviii. 13, 14), particularly assembling for public worship (Lev. xxiii. 3); while private devotions, which ought not to be neglected on any day, were doubly a duty on the Sabbath. Chapter 5. inquires whether Christians ought to observe all that the Fourth Commandment imposed on the Jews? Chap. 6. points out the positive regulations contained in that precept, and which are not obligatory on Christians. Chap. 7. maintains that the commandment has in it also something moral and perpetual; and the 8th considers how much time the law of Nature obliges us to employ in the service of God. Chap. 9. inquires by what authority we observe the Sunday. Chap. 10. replies to the question, Could the Church now alter the institution of the Sunday? whereon the decision is, that were the whole Church to agree for good reasons to change the day, this might lawfully be done; but that neither is such agreement possible, nor are any such reasons conceivable. Chapters 11. and 12. relate to the public and private exercises by means of which the day of rest is to be sanctified; and Chapter 13. to things forbidden to be done-which are, such as hinder the public, domestic, or private service of God, or, though not in themselves sinful, offend the weaker brethren. As for pastimes, he holds that these being seldom innocent, or unattended by evil consequences, they are incompatible with the nature of the Lord's Day. He especially disapproves of feasts. In the 14th chapter, which concludes the Dissertation, he explains why nothing is said about the origin of the Sabbath. "The reason is, not that I doubt that the Sabbath was as ancient as the world, but solely that I do not think it follows necessarily from this that we ought to observe it under the Gospel." (P. 373.) If this conclusion did follow, the day to be observed by us would, he thinks, be the seventh day of the week, which God blessed and sanctified at the creation of the world.

208. HOWELL, JOHN, "a Presbyter of the Church of England.”—A Practical Discourse on the Lord's Day; with Devotions proper for the Day. Lond. 1704. 8vo. Pp. 280.

The Puritan opinions are inculcated with considerable ability by Mr Howell, who, however, regards cessation from work and recreation as incumbent only in respect of their being impediments to works of piety and charity. He conceives that "the Patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian Church are one and the same Church, or spiritual society"; which Church "hath been all along governed by the same laws and religion in the main." (Pp. 5676.) He strenuously maintains, also, the universal and permanent

obligation of the Decalogue; and gets rid of the objection that the Fourth Commandment enjoins the observance of Saturday as the Sabbath, by arguing that only a seventh day's rest after six days' labour is there spoken of: "what day of the week from the creation either the Jewish or Christian Sabbath is, the sacred volumes have not told us; nor have we any other means of discovery. Neither, indeed, is it necessary, nor perhaps convenient, that we should know it: not necessary, because we may commemorate the creation as gratefully and worthily altogether on any one of the six days in course from it as on the seventh; not convenient, lest the knowledge thereof should minister occasion of dispute and division, as we find by experience the bare conjecture, how groundless soever, hath in some measure done." (P. 17.)

"Observe, it is not said, remember the seventh day from the creation; or the seventh from thy deliverance out of Egypt, or from the first fall of manna; but remember the Sabbath-day, a term or title, that, on the supposition of a Divine appointment, will equally fit any day of holy rest, whether first, second, &c., of the Jewish week. It must indeed, as the next words tell us, be a seventh day, but a seventh after six days of labour, which, according as those working-days are variously computed, may and must vary, yet without any alteration in the substance of the Commandment." (Pp. 95, 96.) "Then after an enumeration of the persons concerned in this prohibition, and a provision for the ease of labouring men, and cattle, there follows the reason why a seventh-day Sabbath is enjoined; For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, &c., and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath-day and hallowed it.' Which may be thus paraphrased: As the Lord in the formation of the world worked six days, and resting on the seventh blessed and sanctified it, Gen. ii. 2, 3, so he still reserves to himself the old proportion of man's time on the old reason, a seventh day for holy rest after six of labour, in memory and imitation of his blessing and sanctifying the day of thy rest, as he formerly did the day of his own. This I take to be the true meaning and purport of the commandment and if I am not much mistaken, it will be hard to find any tittle in it peculiar to the Jewish Sabbath, or not fairly applicable to the Christian." (Pp. 96, 97.)

He thus appears to discountenance the opinion that the week is a memorial of the creation; for surely, if used from the beginning, it would have preserved the knowledge which the Westminster Assembly assume to exist, in teaching that "from the begining of the world to the resurrection of Christ, God appointed the seventh day of the week to be the weekly Sabbath." (See above, i. 233.)

In contending for the universal obligation of the Decalogue, he entirely overlooks the question, Whether the teaching of Christ and his apostles, to Jews living under the Mosaic law, be as fully applicable to Gentile Christians as to those of the Jewish race? Moreover, he finds it necessary to maintain that "the Jews were

confederated with God in two several covenants, which, though they were not inconsistent, yet were very different one from the other. For beside that evangelical covenant [of the Decalogue] which belonged to them as a Church, or spiritual society, they had, as a Commonwealth, or civil state, a covenant of a political nature, and that peculiar to them, and their proselytes of righteousness, who made one body politic with them.' (P. 77.)

It is difficult to imagine that either this plan of splitting into two "the covenant" which we read of in the books of Moses, or even the notion that the Jews played the two distinct parts of God's Church and his chosen People or race, could have gained a footing among divines, if, instead of ascribing to the word ixxλnoia (ecclesia), in the Septuagint, the modern theological sense of the word Church, they had inquired more carefully what it was used to signify by the ancient writers. For the meaning of ecclesia is in fact nothing more abstruse than an assembly. It" answers to the Hebrew word kahal, which denotes an assembly legally convened. Thus the Jewish people, when assembled as a body politic to receive the law, are called kahal (Deut. ix. 10); and St Stephen, referring to this assembly, styles it ecclesia (Acts viii. 38): nay more, the turbulent crowd in the temple of Diana at Ephesus is also called ecclesia (Acts xix. 32), because it was a legal assembly." (The Synagogue and the Church, condensed from Vitringa by Joshua L. Bernard, p. 1.)*

Howell says that " some of the ancient Fathers distinguish the Lord's-day from the Jewish day of rest, by calling it the Christian Sabbath,' our Sabbath,' or the like." (P. 99.) But instead of quoting any evidence of this from the Fathers, he merely gives two references, the first of which is to Origen's 23d Homily on Numbers, containing a passage (quoted above, i. 196) which is so far from warranting his assertion, that its tendency is precisely the reverse. His other reference is to a discourse on the resurrection of Christ by Gregory of Nyssa, which I have not seen, but from which Cocceius, in his Indagatio Naturæ Sabbati, &c., p. 202, quotes a few sentences that have a like hostile tendency, as far as they go; and, in a passage cited by Mr Holden from Gregory's 7th Homily on Ecclesiastes, this Father, following the usual course of the early Christian writers, represents the Christian Sabbath to be a rest from sin: "The law," says he, "commands us to keep a Sabbath, or a rest from sinful works: for the scope of the two tables of the Levitical ordinances, and of the laws in Deuteronomy, is, that we may cease from those works, the doing of which is sinful."

"In the New Testament," it is added, "the word ecclesia is used in an extended, and also in a limited sense; it signifies the whole Christian community, the entire body of believers,-governed by one spirit, united by one faith, with one supreme head, Jesus Christ, in heaven; it is also applied to the Christian community in one city, or even to the congregation accustomed to assemble in one house (Philemon; 1 Cor. xvi. 19); but still, in every case, a legal bond of union enters into the idea of the word." (Bernard, p. 2.)

VOL. II.

I

(Holden's Christian Sabbath, p. 315.) It seems likely, then, that the proof from Gregory is as bad as that from Origen; though, were it otherwise, we should find nothing important in the fact that a writer, in whose time the Lord's Day was kept (in obedience to the edict of Constantine) as a day of rest from labour, had called it what it then was-" our Sabbath," or "the Christian Sabbath."

With respect to recreation he says: It is certain, that to eat and drink on our Lord's Day for the recreating or refreshing of the body and mind, and that in a more splendid manner than men ordinarily do on other days, is very agreeable to the design and nature of a festival as well as to the allowed* practice of the Jews on their Sabbath. But forasmuch as the festival is a religious one, all due regard is to be had to its religious duties; ' and whether we eat or drink, or whatever we do,' we are then more especially to intend the glory of God,' 1 Cor. x. 31. And to make it a day of gluttony, drunkenness, and other kinds of sensuality; or spend more of that sacred time in pampering of the body, and fulfilling the lusts of the flesh, than is really consistent with the due care of the soul; is to make it a heathenish rather than Christian feast, and that too of the worser, the looser sort,

"Again, as we cannot but allow of such meals or provisions as are proper for our religious festival, so it is but fit and congruous that some competent time be allowed for digesting them; and as far as any innocent inoffensive discourse, or exercise, whether diverting or not diverting, may be needful or requisite for health and digestion, so far do they seem to be allowable and proper for the festival.

"Besides, a moderate refreshment of the body, and relaxation of the mind, may be sometimes requisite in order to devotion itself, which, if long continued, is, without such helps, apt to flag, expire, and die. For the mind of man in its present state of union with the body, doth and must act by the animal spirits as its instruments; and unless these be supplied, or excited, as occasion requires, it cannot be long intent upon any subject, and must therefore, when tired out with the exercises of devotion, have some convenient and becoming relaxation or refreshment, whereby it may be enabled to return to them with fresh vigour and alacrity.

"So that supposing and allowing for the good intention of some persons, they are none of the best or most discreet friends to the day, or the devotion of it, who, as if they had forgotten that they are flesh as well as spirit, do trouble themselves or others with little niceties and unreasonable scrupulosities in these matters, such as instead of advancing the interest of religion do not a little dis-serve and prejudice it; whilst they not only make those who are possessed with them proud, censorious, ungovernable, and more idly busy than the things scrupled at would have done, but give cccasion, to men of looser morals to speak evil of our most reason

* "Vide Lightf. Chronic., sect. 20; item Hor. Hebr. in Luc. xiv. 1."