man should rest on the Sabbath-day. God
rested on the Sabbath-day and sanctified it; and therefore man ought
also to rest on the Sabbath and keep it holy. But I know not where we
shall find grounds for the belief that the Sabbath-day during which
God rested was merely commensurate with one of the Sabbaths of
short-lived man--a brief period measured by a single revolution of the
earth on its axis. We have not, as has been shown, a shadow of
evidence that he resumed his work of creation on the morrow; the
geologist finds no trace of post-Adamic creation; the theologian can
tell us of none. God's Sabbath of rest may still exist; the work of
redemption may be the work of his Sabbath-day. That elevatory process
through successive acts of creation, which engaged him during myriads
of ages, was of an ordinary week-day character; but when the term of
his moral government began, the elevatory process peculiar to it
assumed the divine character of the Sabbath. This special view appears
to lend peculiar emphasis to the reason embodied in the commandment.
The collation of the passage with the geologic record seems, as if by
a species of retranslation, to make it enunciate as its injunction,
"Keep this day, not merely as a day of memorial related to a past
fact, but also as a day of co-operation with God in the work of
elevation, in relation both to a present fact and a future purpose."
"God keeps his Sabbath," it says, "in order that he may save; keep
yours also that ye may be saved." It serves besides to throw light on
the prominence of the Sabbatical command, in a digest of law of which
no jot or tittle can pass away until the fulfillment of all things.
During the present dynasty of probation and trial, that special work
of both God and man on which the character of the future dynasty
depends is the Sabbath-day work of saving and being saved.

"The common objection to that special view which regards the days of
creation as immensely protracted periods of time, furnishes a
specimen, if not of reasoning in a circle, at least of reasoning from
a mere assumption. It first takes for granted that the Sabbath-day
during which God rested was a day of but twenty-four hours, and then
argues from the supposition that, in order to keep up the proportion
between the six previous working days and the seventh day of rest,
which the reason annexed to the fourth commandment demands, these
previous days must also have been twenty-four hours each.