character more evangelical than one has been accustomed to attribute to it; is scarcely the exact Institution to the continuance of which the Fathers objected, or which the Romish Doctors, and the Puritans, and of later years the Scottish Presbyterians, more or less chose as their model.

Secondly, that our Lord Himself appears to have observed the Sabbath in the way that He recommended it to be observed, and does not appear to have formally abrogated it.

Thirdly, that it is not quite evident why an institution capable of this favourable construction should have been abrogated.

I have no difficulty in replying to these remarks.

As to the character of the Sabbath, the passages of Scripture to which allusion has been made, the account of it given by Josephus, and the teaching of Christ, seem to make it such as I have described. The Pharisees and the Rabbins misunderstood its character; and we, I think, should equally misunderstand it, if we supposed that Christ recognised their doctrine as that which Moses intended, and Scripture in general warranted; or that He said of it, "This may have done very well in past time, but I will show you a more excellent way." This was not His language. When He touched upon it, it was to explain not to supersede the law of Moses respecting it. The time had not yet arrived for that. He was bound to fulfil the whole law-political, ceremonial, moral—and He did so the law of the Sabbath,325 the law of circumcision, the law of attendance at feasts, the law of tribute to the Temple, as well as the weightier matters which concern the inner man. But so deeply ingrained had the traditional teaching concerning the Sabbath become, that the gloss was mistaken for the text, and the word of the expositor, the inculcation of mere rest, the condensation of all religion into the ultra-ritual observance of mere rest on

one day, was taken for the word of God. Hence, when He cleared away these cobwebs, He was supposed to be, not fulfilling the law in its true import, but destroying it altogether. He made it appear worthy of God, as a step in the economy of grace, but He did not therefore make it an ordinance to survive, or capable of surviving, the other shadows of the law. For, (it cannot be repeated too often), the seventh-day Sabbath was only a part of the Jewish 326 Sabbatical system, and that system, considered as a whole, was by no means an evangelical one. It was a system designed, among other things, to keep the Jews separate from the rest of the world, as depositaries of what amount of truth God had thought fit to reveal to them, and to remind them at every turn of the responsibilities of their condition. Accordingly, with every abatement that can be made for the false elements with which the Pharisees had overlaid it, it was essentially a system of prohibitions and restrictions-"touch not, taste not, handle not "-it was a system of which fear of transgression was the predominant motive, not clear perception and love of the right; it was a system by which truth was rather shadowed than revealed a system of types and figures, the meaning of which was not fully known to any, and was by very few appreciated at all. And, however understood, it was, as an unsubstantial and typical system, to be, with the law generally, swept away when the reality should come, when the antitype should be manifested. This was not to be till the Resurrection. Till that time our Lord observed the Law. Circumcision, Holy-days, and Sabbaths, were a part of the ordinances to which He submitted Himself for a while, though, as is evident from His practice and teaching, from His spiritualizing of the Law, and from His proclaiming "the acceptable year" and announcing Himself as its introducer, He considered them to be things decaying and waxing old, and ready to vanish away. The Apostles,

after the Resurrection,327 struck a different note, for the time for striking it had come. All things are new, said they-new in Him and because of Him-He is the true rest, the true or Great Sabbath, of which all other Sabbaths were but heralds. They waited to tell their message: having told it, they have passed away. Judaism, whether in theory or in practice, it matters not which, whether it develop itself in the observance of the Law as it was intended, or in that astute and subtle refinement of it introduced by the Pharisees and Rabbins, has vanished away. This was from the beginning implied in their preaching, and it was not at first necessary to be explicit. But, as time went on, Judaism began to intrude itself into the Church. Hence the Council of Jerusalem. Hence the

text and its assertion, that no man should condemn his brother for neglecting Sabbaths and other ordinances of the Law. Still, though the Council had spoken and Paul had written, Judaism would thrust forward its pretensions, perhaps with more vexatious accretions than before, and blended with various heresies. Hence the Fathers argued against it without pausing to discriminate between the pure and the impure forms of it. And Romanist, Puritan, and Presbyterian alike, in so far as they adopted Sabbatarianism, exhibited an exaggerated revival, not merely of the Law of Moses, (that had been unmeaning enough, now that the reality had come), but of the Pharisaic glosses, which even in our Lord's time had become grievous to be borne. Taken at its very best, the earthly Sabbath was no true rest, it was a shadow of the true rest, a shadow not fully realized by deliverance from Egypt or by entrance upon Canaan, but only by deliverance from sin. This, the true Joshua, and He alone, was by His death to accomplish, by His Resurrection to prove, by His sending of the Holy Ghost to communicate to His people here, and by receiving them to Himself to impart to them more perfectly hereafter.

Therefore, the Sabbath, the Sabbath of the Fourth Commandment, with everything contained under the word Sabbath, or akin to it, days and times and years, the strongholds and yet the weaknesses of the Law, is abolished. It was a positive ordinance of Judaism, and with Judaism has disappeared. But this is without prejudice to the establishment of the Lord's Day, and without its being at all necessary to seek for the Lord's Day, either identity in substance, or directly antitypical connexion, with the Sabbath. How far the Lord's Day, besides being, as I showed in an earlier Lecture, a positive ordinance of Scriptural and Apostolical Christianity, is one of the forms in which the oaßßario pòs which remaineth for the people of God would naturally and of course find expression; how far it is analogous to the Sabbath, and whether it may not contain in it the same elements though in a different order, and arranged in the spirit of love which casteth out fear, I shall consider in the next Lecture.

LECTURE V.

HEBREWS IV. 8, 9.

FOR IF JESUS (JOSHUA) HAD GIVEN THEM REST, THEN WOULD HE NOT AFTER

WARDS HAVE SPOKEN OF ANOTHER DAY.

THERE REMAINETH THEREFORE A REST (A KEEPING OF SABBATH) FOR THE

PEOPLE OF GOD.

Εἰ γὰρ αὐτοὺς Ἰησοῦς κατέπαυσεν, οὐκ ἂν περὶ ἄλλης ἐλάλει μετὰ ταῦτα ἡμέρας.

Αρα ἀπολείπεται σαββατισμὸς τῷ λαῷ τοῦ Θεοῦ.

I CONCLUDED my Fourth Lecture with three remarks:

First, that the Sabbath properly so called, the Sabbath of the Jews, with everything connected with it as a positive ordinance, was swept away by Christianity.

Secondly, that this is without prejudice to the Lord's Day; and

Thirdly, that it is not necessary to seek for the Lord's Day, either identity in substance, or directly antitypical connexion, with the Sabbath.

Certain passages however have been brought forward, as tending to invalidate these propositions. Three of them are of the nature of prophecies, uttered respectively by Isaiah, by Ezekiel, and by our Lord. From these it is argued that the Sabbath is still of obligation. Three of them occur in the writings of St. Paul. It is said of these, that