necessary repast, on the Sabbath-day, had their warrant even in the law itself, and in all reason: but to enjoin this man to carry his bed on that day, and to bear it home, whereas the bed might very well have lain there till the Sabbath was over; and his home was no one knows how far off;-certainly it showeth that he intended to show his authority over the Sabbath, and to try the man's faith and obedience, in a singular manner. The speech of Christ, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,' &c., was made by him before the Sanhedrim, before which he was called to answer for what he had done on the Sabbath-day.

6

As God doth good on the Sabbath, dispensing his ordinances, sending rains and sunshine, providing food for all flesh, &c.; so Christ did good on this Sabbath, healing a disease, and recovering a man from so long an infirmity. Herein the parallel holdeth clearly: but Christ went a step farther; for he commanded the man to carry his bed, which tended to the visible violation of the Sabbath, which God's providential actings do not do. It is true, indeed, that God also commanded the priests of the temple to work on the Sabbath, in killing, slaying, and sacrificing beasts; but this was for the greater promotion of his service: and he commanded Joshua to march about Jericho on the Sabbath-day; but that was for the more forwarding of the public good: but this command to the man to carry his bed, tended neither to the one end nor to the other, but merely and mainly to show the power and authority that Christ had over the Sabbath. Scan but considerately that command and action, and you will find the tendency of it, so directly and properly, to nothing as to this very thing. Say, it was to show the completeness of the cure;'-that might have been sufficiently, and indeed as much, showed, either by the man's sound walking without his bed, or by carrying his bed the next day. Was it more for the glorifying of God? Regarding the bare action, one would suppose, that to have kept the Sabbath, and not giving offence to others, might have tended to that end more fairly. There was, therefore this chief thing in it, besides the trial of the man's faith and obedience,-that Christ would glorify his divine power and authority, in showing his command and disposal, that he had over the Sabbath.

"Therefore, whereas his pleading, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,' does answer most directly but to one objection that lay against him,—namely, for healing on the Sabbath; yet doth it satisfy the other sufficiently, which was his command to the man to carry his bed: for he that wrought in other things, with the same authority that the Father worketh, he also hath the same authority over the Sabbath that the Father hath; who as he ordained it, so can he dispense with it, as pleaseth him.

"Now Christ, in this command, cannot be conceived to have intended to vilify the Sabbath, as it was a day of rest,-or to lay that ordinance, of keeping such a day of rest unto the Lord, in the dirt; but he that was to alter the Sabbath to a new day, and in that equality of working which he had with the Father, he was

to set a new Sabbath-day upon the finishing of the work of redemption, as the Father had done the old, upon the creation: and, therefore, as in preface to such a thing, he both giveth such a command, and pleadeth for what he had done, from his divine authority, as beginning to shake the day, which, within two years, was to be changed to another. The proof of the divine institution of the day of the Christian Sabbath, may be begun here.” (Vol. v. pp. 241-6.)

The fact that there was no controversy in the early ages of Christianity about the keeping of the Lord's Day, is thought by some late writers to militate against the opinion that the Sabbath had been transferred to the first day of the week; since, if it had, the opponents of those Judaizing Christians who in the third and fourth centuries maintained the obligation to observe both the seventh-day Sabbath and the Lord's Day, must have used (which they never did) the silencing argument, that the observance of the first day superseded of necessity that of the seventh. (See The Modern Sabbath Examined, p. 138; Hengstenberg, p. 53; Cox, p. 530.) Lightfoot, however, without seeming to have this important fact in view, says: "The first day of the week was everywhere celebrated for the Christian Sabbath; and—which is not to be passed over without observing-as far as appears from Scripture, there is nowhere any dispute of that matter. There was controversy concerning circumcision, and other points of the Jewish religion, whether they were to be retained or not retained; but nowhere, as we read, concerning the changing of the Sabbath. There were indeed some Jews converted to the Gospel, who, as in some other things they retained a smatch of their old Judaism, so they did in the observation of days, Rom. xiv. 5, Gal. iv. 10; but yet not rejecting or neglecting the Lord's Day. They celebrated it and made no manner of scruple, as appears, concerning it; but they would have their old festival-days retained too, and they disputed not at all whether the Lord's Day were to be celebrated, but whether the Jewish Sabbath were not to be celebrated also." (Vol. xii. p. 556). On the supposition of the other writers just referred to, that no Christian Sabbath had by this time been set up, controversy could not occur: and it is to be considered whether the opposite assumption of Lightfoot is compatible with Paul's statement in Rom. xiv. 5, that of those he addressed, one party "esteemed every day alike,” and was blameless in doing so.

158. HUGHES, GEORGE, B.D.-Aphorisms, or Select Propositions of the Scripture, shortly determining the Doctrine of the Sabbath. 1670.

159. OWEN, JOHN, D.D., the most eminent of the Independent divines (died 1683).—Exercitations concerning the Name, Original, Nature, Use, and Continuance, of

a Day of Sacred Rest. Wherein the Original of the Sabbath from the Foundation of the World, the Morality of the Fourth Commandment, with the Change of the Seventh Day, are inquired into. Together with an Assertion of the Divine Institution of the Lord's Day, and Practical Directions for its due Observation. Lond. 1671. 8vo. Pp. 454.

This treatise was afterwards included by its author among his Preliminary Exercitations to the Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, of which it forms Nos. 35-40. Two editions of the Exposition (with the Exercitations prefixed), each in seven volumes 8vo, have been printed in Edinburgh during the present century— Wright's in 1814, and Goold's in 1854; the latter forming vols. xviii.-xxiv. of Goold's excellent edition of the entire Works of Owen, but being sold also separately. The six Exercitations concerning the Day of Sacred Rest are contained in the second of these separate volumes, which is vol. xix. of the Works. There is a London edition of the Preliminary Exercitations apart from the Exposition (1 vol. 8vo, 1840), of which see pp. 601-750.

Dr Owen stands in the front rank of those who have advocated the divine authority and moral nature of the Christian Sabbath. His learning, acuteness, earnestness, charity, good sense and vigorous style, contribute to render his work, even at this day, one of the strongest supports of the Sabbatarian cause. Its chief distinctive feature is the great stress laid upon Heb. iv. 3-11, as a direct scriptural authority for the Christian Sabbath. This passage he expounds very fully; for although, says he, "it is touched on by all who have contended about the original and duration of the Sabbatical rest, it has not yet, that I know of, been diligently examined by any. I shall not fear to lay much of the weight of the cause wherein I am engaged upon it, and therefore shall take a view of the whole context, and the design of the apostle therein." (Exerc. 5, § 11.) Except, however, by Dr Wardlaw and some minor disputants in the Sabbath controversy, the passage has been generally understood as referring solely to the repose of the saints in heaven; and in a recent Prize Essay on "The Universality and Perpetuity of the Sabbath," the writer "deems it better to waive what after all must be confessed to be but dubious support." (Defence of the Universality, &c., by Alex. Oliver, p. 49. Edin. 1852.) Nor should the fact be overlooked that the epistle was addressed to Jews by a Jewish writer-usually thought to be Paul, but whom Neander concludes to have been most probably "an apostolic man of the Pauline school." (Hist. of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church, p. 347 ; translation in Bohn's Standard Library.)

Dr Owen is one of those who see, in the caution given by Jesus to his disciples about praying that their flight might not be on the

Sabbath-day (Matt. xxiv. 20), a declaration of "the continued obligation of the law of the Sabbath, as a moral precept upon all." (Exerc. 3, § 47.) But here also many even of the Sabbatarians have found reason to dissent.

After giving an excellent summary of the disputed points about the Sabbath (Exerc. 1, §§ 4-6, quoted by Cox, pp. 322-325), he adds, with admirable candour and modesty :

men.

"The truth is, most of the different apprehensions recounted, have been entertained and contended for, by persons learned and godly, all equally pretending to a love unto truth, and care for the preservation and promotion of holiness and godliness amongst And it were to be wished that this were the only instance whereby we might evince, that the best of men in this world do know but in part, and prophesy but in part. But they are too many to be recounted, although most men act in themselves and towards others, as if they were themselves liable to no mistakes, and that it is an inexpiable crime in others, to be in anything mistaken. But as this should make us jealous over ourselves, and our own apprehensions in this matter; so ought the consideration of it to affect us with tenderness and forbearance towards those who dissent from us, and whom we therefore judge to err, and be mistaken.

"But that which principally we are to learn from this consideration, is, with what care and diligence we ought to inquire into the certain rule of truth in this matter. For whatever we do determine, we shall be sure to find men learned and godly otherwise minded. And yet in our determinations are the consciences of the disciples of Christ greatly concerned, which ought not by us to be causelessly burdened, nor yet countenanced in the neglect of any duty that God doth require. Slight and perfunctory disquisitions will be of little use in this matter; nor are men to think that their opinions are firm and established, when they have obtained a seeming countenance unto them from two or three doubtful texts of Scripture. The principles and foundations of truth in this matter lie deep, and require a diligent investigation." (§ 7.)

The advocates of the seventh-day Sabbath are answered in Exercitation 5, §§ 32-35.

At the only place where reference is made to Rom. xiv. 5, nothing more is said of that passage than that, along with Gal. iv. 10, and Col. ii. 16, 17, it proves a "common consent that whatever in the institution and observance of the Sabbath under the Old Testament was peculiar unto that state of the Church, either in its own nature, or in its use and signification, or in its manner of observance, is taken away by virtue of those rules." (Exerc. 5, § 29.)

We have already seen the alarm into which Dr Owen was thrown by the discovery that the original text of Scripture had not been preserved from such corruption as all other ancient books have undergone in the hands of transcribers. (Above, i. 269.) Another source of anxiety to him was the general reception which his con

temporaries were giving to the Copernican system of the universe, so different from what had been understood by all the world in former ages to be clearly revealed in the first chapter of Genesis. This "late hypothesis fixing the sun as in the centre of the world," he pronounces to be "built on fallible phenomena, and advanced by many arbitrary presumptions, against evident testimonies of Scripture, and reasons as probable as any which are produced in its confirmation." (Exerc. 2, § 16.) Probably the bearing of this great discovery on the question about a primeval Sabbath was more fully apprehended by him than it has commonly been.

Regarding the mode of spending the day of sacred rest, he writes with great moderation :—

"Although," says he, "the day be wholly to be dedicated unto the ends of a sacred rest before insisted on, yet,

"1. Duties in their performance drawn out unto such a length as to beget wearisomeness and satiety, tend not unto edification, nor do any way promote the sanctification of the name of God in the worship itself. Regard, therefore, in all such performances is to be had, 1. Unto the weakness of the natural constitution of some, the infirmities and indispositions of others, who are not able to abide in the outward part of duties, as others can. And there is no wise shepherd, but will rather suffer the stronger sheep of his flock to lose somewhat of what they might reach unto in his guidance of them, than to compel the weaker to keep pace with them to their hurt, and it may be their ruin. Better a great number should complain of the shortness of some duties, who have strength and desires for a longer continuance in them, than that a few who are sincere should be really discouraged by being overburdened, and have the service thereby made useless unto them. I always loved in sacred duties, that observation of Seneca concerning the orations of Cassius Severus, when they heard him, 'Timebamus ne desineret:' 'We were afraid that he would end.' 2. To the spiritual edge of the affections of men, which ought to be whetted, and not through tediousness in duties abated and taken off. Other things of a like nature might be added, which for some considerations I shall forbear.

"2. Refreshments helpful to nature, so far as to refresh it, that it may have a supply of spirits to go on cheerfully in the duties of holy worship, are lawful and useful. To macerate the body with abstinences on this day, is required of none; and to turn it into a fast, or to fast upon it, is generally condemned by the ancients. Wherefore, to forbear provision of necessary food for families on this day, is Mosaical; and the enforcement of the particular precepts, about not kindling fire in our houses on this day, baking and preparing the food of it the day before, cannot be insisted on without a reintroduction of the seventh day precisely, to whose observation they were annexed, and thereby of the law and spirit of the old covenant. Provided always that these refreshments be, 1. Seasonable for the time of them, and not when public duties require our attendance on them. 2. Accompanied with a singular