charity. Again, I am not prepared to utter either anathemas or lamentations if Ministers of State occasionally, in a time of great pressure of public business, and in a quiet way, avail themselves of an hour or two for conference with each other on that day. I do not commend it; but I do not condemn it. They cannot command their own times. Public affairs may be full as pressing and may call for immediate conference, as much as an ox or an ass for deliverance from a pit into which it has fallen; and I think that love to one's country may justify a deviation from a ritual observance of the Sabbath, as much as love or pity for a beast. In fact, if the most scrupulous will examine the frame of their own minds, and the real spirituality of their own conversation for two or three hours on some part of the Sabbath, they will find but little right, whatever their disposition be, to cast a stone at a poor man with his family, or at a Minister of State with his compeers. Again, I say, they may be right; but the others who think and act differently are not therefore wrong. Those who ate, and those who refused to eat, meat offered to idols, were both right if they acted to the Lord, as were those also who observed, and those who did not observe, certain days, which under the Jewish dispensation were actually prescribed. I will tell you what I consider the perfect rule: let all judge for themselves in relation to the ritual observance of such matters; the strong not despising the weak, and the weak forbearing to sit in judgment on the strong. This will be the surest and best discharge of the duty of all parties whether to God or man: to God, who has said, 'I will have mercy and not sacrifice;' and to man, who should be left to stand or fall to his own Master." So writes Charles Simeon.

But the very mercifulness of this teaching led to two very remarkable results. Men quite in earnest on the subject perceived that it was not in accordance with the

theory on which it was founded. "If Sunday is the Sabbath, it ought to be observed exactly as the Jews may be supposed to have observed it," was their feeling. Hence their inculcation of what seemed the closest approach to such an observance, the strictness of a Scottish Sunday,497 which Dr. Chalmers deprecated, and, as far as he could, endeavoured to modify. Though it is strange to find even him, when speaking of the person who, according to his view, observes Sunday rightly and literally, write thus:-" He could, but for example's sake, walk fearlessly abroad, and recognise in the beauties of nature the hand that has graced and adorned it." A few words,408 written by an intelligent resident in Scotland, will convey some idea of that strictness. "Here, (he says), it is wrong to touch the piano, even for the most sacred music, on Sunday; it is wrong to take a walk, even between the services. One distinguished member of the Free Kirk openly avows his wish to see the interference of the police to prevent such a desecration of the day. At a recent meeting 499 of the Presbyters and Lay Elders of the largest non-conforming body in Scotland-the United Presbyterians-some one expressed his horror that on the evening of the Lord's Day he found a Protestant minister walking with his wife on the ramparts of Strasbourg. That stroll was a miserable adoption of the Continental Sunday.' In many places a person can only preserve his credit as an observer of the Lord's Day, and obtain the indulgence of a walk, by frequenting a Church as distant from his own dwelling as his walking powers will allow; and, (he adds,) the extreme severity which is enforced out of doors produces very often a system of covert laxity." Such a Sunday as this, many who held the Sabbatarian theory felt themselves bound to introduce into England.

This was one result. Here is another. Finding that Sabbatarianism was producing here as much evasion as it

produces in Scotland, if only nominally carried out-as much unsocial austerity, if really carried out-and as much aversion to everything religious on the part of many who judged Christianity by this specimen of it, Archbishop Whately was led to re-examine the foundation of the system. His inquiries led him further, to an attempt to re-establish what has been termed the purely Ecclesiastical theory, which, as I understand it, introduces us to difficulties of another description. Certainly, it has met with no great favor, and I do not think that the development of it by the "National Sunday League to obtain the opening of the British Museum and other National Institutions on Sunday afternoon, and the repeal of the law which compels the closing of the Crystal Palace, and of other collections for instruction and rational recreation on that day," has at all added to its popularity. Men are afraid of a theory which they see touches the conscience only by Church ruling, and not by Scriptural and Apostolical authority. If the Sabbatarian view seems to be more severe than the authorised documents of the Church demand, and to reimpose fetters which Christ by His coming struck off, and which His Apostles did not gather from the ground and bind upon us; this other view seems to allow something more than liberty, or at least to open the door to something more than liberty.

At present the two opposing schools stand in direct antagonism. Is there no method by which they may be reconciled? The Church of England has not encouraged either view very decidedly. But with her accustomed judgment she has, both by what she has said, and by what she has forborne to say,-intimated that while the Lord's Day is of Divine obligation, it is an institution established for the good of the whole man. The whole man I saythat marvellously composite being, of heavenly destiny, but of earthly conformation,―of high aims, but of weak and

corruptible body, making him often fall short of themand who, until he is clothed upon with a body incorruptible, requires refreshment for body as well as soul, even on the Lord's Day; yea, who may demand it on His Day, whose Great Human Heart could be touched with a feeling for the infirmities of His brethren.

LECTURE VIII.

PSALM CXVIII. 24.

THIS IS THE DAY WHICH THE LORD HATH MADE; WE WILL REJOICE AND BE GLAD IN IT.

Αὕτη ἡ ἡμέρα ἣν ἐποίησεν ὁ Κύριος· ἀγαλλιασώμεθα καὶ εὐφρανθῶμεν ἐν αὐτῇ.

THE tendency of what has been said hitherto is this:-To show, that as the Lord's Day is of Divine institution, because of Apostolic practice and of Scriptural indication, it is not necessary to resort to a Judaic origin of it in order to make it binding upon the conscience. I have contended that the Ancient Church considered it to be a day of obligation, quite independently of any connexion. with the Sabbath, on purely Christian grounds;-that it was not until after the fifth century that this view was materially impaired; and that it was not until towards the end of the sixteenth century that a Sabbatarian origin was formally proposed instead.

I have contended also, that in the Ancient Church nothing like a Sabbatarian view of the manner in which the Lord's Day should be observed, was even thought of;— that if its origin was not traced by the early Christians to enactments contained in the Jewish law, still less were they in the habit of referring, I will not say to the glosses put upon it by the Pharisees and Rabbins, but to that law