sacredness of
God's abiding ordinances with the temporary institutions of the
sanctuary. But it reckons the Sabbath among the former.

It is objected that our Lord Himself treated the Sabbath lightly, as a
worn-out ordinance. But He was "a minister of the circumcision," and
always discussed the lawfulness of His Sabbath miracles as a Jew with
Jews. Thus He argued that men, admittedly under the law, baked the
shewbread, circumcised children, and even rescued cattle from jeopardy
upon the seventh day. He appealed to the example of David, who met a
sufficiently urgent necessity by eating the consecrated bread, "which
was not lawful for him to eat" (Matt. xii. 4).

He did not hint that the law of the sabbath had disappeared, but
insisted that it was meant to serve man and not to oppress him: that
"the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mark ii.
27).

Now, there is not in the life of Christ an assertion, so broad and
strong as that the Sabbath was made for the human race, which can be
narrowed down to a discussion of any merely local and temporary
institution. He Who stood highest, and saw the widest horizons, declared
that the Sabbath was intended for humanity, and not for a section or a
sect of it. Not because He was the King of the Jews, but because He was
the Son of Man, the ripe fruit and the leader of the world-wide race
which it was given to bless, therefore He was also its Lord.

And in Him, so are we. Like all things present and things to come, it is
our help, we are not its slaves.

There is something abject in the notion of a Christian freeman, who has
been for a long week imprisoned in some gloomy and ill-ventilated
workshop, whose lungs would be purified, and therefore his spirits
uplifted, and therefore his reason and his affections invigorated, and
therefore his worship rendered more fresh, warm and reasonable, by the
breathing of a purer air, yet whose conception of a day of rest is so
slavish that he dares not "rest" from the pollution of an infected
atmosphere, and from the closeness of a London court, because he
conceives it imperative to "rest" only from that bodily exercise, to
enjoy which would be to him the most real and the most delightful repose
of all.

But there are other things more abject still; and one of them is the
miserable insincerity of the affluent and luxurious, using the
exceptional case of him whose week-days are thus oppressed, to excuse
their own wanton n