w our hours of sleep. They awake before us; and ere the
earliest labourer has said his prayers, have not the woods and valleys
been ringing with their hymns? Why, therefore, may not they, who know,
each week-day, the hour of our lying down and our rising up, know also
the day of our general rest? The animals whose lot is labour, shall
they not know it? Yes; the horse on that day sleeps in shade or sunshine
without fear of being disturbed--his neck forgets the galling collar,
"and there are forty feeding like one," all well knowing that their
fresh meal on the tender herbage will not be broken in upon before the
dews of next morning, ushering in a new day to them of toil or travel.

So much for our belief in the knowledge, instinctive or from a sort of
reason, possessed by the creatures of the inferior creation of the
heaven-appointed Sabbath to man and beast. But it is also true that we
transfer our inward feelings to their outward condition, and with our
religious spirit imbue all the ongoings of animated and even inanimated
life. There is always a shade of melancholy, a tinge of pensiveness, a
touch of pathos, in all profound rest. Perhaps because it is so much in
contrast with the turmoil of our ordinary being. Perhaps because the
soul, when undisturbed, will, from the impulse of its own divine nature,
have high, solemn, and awful thoughts. In such state, it transmutes all
things into a show of sympathy with itself. The church-spire, rising
high above the smoke and stir of a town, when struck by the sun-fire,
seems, on a market-day, a tall building in the air, that may serve as a
guide to people from a distance flocking into the bazaars. The same
church-spire, were its loud-tongued bell to call from aloft on the
gathering multitude below, to celebrate the anniversary of some great
victory, Waterloo or Trafalgar, would appear to stretch up its stature
triumphantly into the sky--so much the more triumphantly, if the
standard of England were floating from its upper battlements. But to the
devout eye of faith, doth it not seem to express its own character, when
on the Sabbath it performs no other office than to point to heaven?

So much for the second solution. But independently of both, no wonder
that all nature seems to rest on the Sabbath; for it doth rest--all of
it, at least, that appertains to man and his condition. If the Fourth
Commandment be kept--at rest is all the household--and all the fields
round it are at