LECTURE IV.

COLOSSIANS II. 16, 17.

LET NO MAN THEREFORE JUDGE YOU IN MEAT OR IN DRINK, OR IN RESPECT OF AN HOLY-DAY, OR OF THE NEW MOON, OR OF THE SABBATH DAYS,

WHICH ARE A SHADOW OF THINGS TO COME BUT THE BODY IS OF CHRIST.

Μὴ οὖν τις ὑμᾶς κρινέτω ἐν βρώσει ἢ ἐν πόσει ἢ ἐν μέρει ἑορτῆς ἢ νουμηνίας ἢ σαββάτων,

"Α ἐστιν σκιὰ τῶν μελλόντων, τὸ δὲ σῶμα Χριστοῦ.

THAT the Lord's Day is a positive ordinance of Scriptural and Apostolic Christianity, standing on grounds, and supported by considerations, peculiarly its own, and not borrowed or continued from the older Dispensation-that the Sabbath was not held to be of obligation upon Christians, so far as the Apostles and the Early Church may be cited as authorities-and that attempts to regulate the Lord's Day by the exactness of the precedent of the Sabbath, or to found it primarily 275 on the command given to the Jews for the establishment of the Sabbath, seem therefore to be a rebuilding of things which have been destroyed, and to make those who do so transgressorshas been the argument of the previous Lectures. There are, however, two points in respect of which it is as yet by no means complete. We have to show how Sabbatarianism developed itself in the post-Reformation, as well as in the

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ante-Reformation Church. This is one point, but it may stand over for the present. The other point is, a full elucidation of the nature of the Sabbath. Its history subsequent to our Lord's Resurrection has been treated, though incidentally, with sufficient minuteness. We have seen, that, as a matter of fact, it was not considered of obligation upon Christians in the days of the Apostles. We have not found any practice or statement which contradicts this state of things, in the Church of the second and third centuries, or which materially breaks in upon it, even of the fourth and fifth centuries. And we might perhaps be contented with this clear evidence from antiquity that Sabbatarianism at any period would be an intruder into the Church. But, in England especially, the controversies subsequent to the Reformation bring the Sabbath very prominently forward, and raise questions concerning it which were never mooted in primitive times. It seems, therefore, desirable, and, indeed, necessary, before we enter upon those questions, to settle these: What was the Sabbath? On what ground was it observed, until the time when, as we suppose, it ceased to be obligatory? How was it intended to be observed, and how was it observed, while in force? And, why did it cease, (if indeed it did cease), to be in force when our Lord rose from the dead?

The first questions to be determined may be stated thus: Was the observance of the Sabbath a matter of Natural or Moral Law, or did it arise solely from external command? If not the former, why not? If the latter, to whom was the external command, which originated the observance, given?

It was scarcely, I think, a matter of Natural or Moral Law,276 in the sense of being an obligation discoverable without express revelation. Nothing that man finds within him could possibly direct him to the seventh day, in

preference to any other day, as a day of rest and worship of God. The utmost that can be said in this respect is what I am going to state. In so far as the commandment to observe the Sabbath implies positions discoverable by the light of reason, (namely, that our Creator demands our gratitude and worship, and that these are best exhibited and most surely paid by periodic appropriation of time to Him), there is a Natural or Moral element on which the commandment is founded. Of course, when an external command has been given, obedience to it may and does become moral in a secondary sense-we may see the reasonableness of it, and our duty to conform our conduct. to its requirements, considering the relations in which wer stand to the promulgator. But this is not the question at present. In the strict acceptation of the term, the duty of observing the Sabbath is not natural or moral. Perhaps, if we were to ascend to the very earliest conceivable point in the history of the human heart, we should find the moral element of which we are speaking reducible yet further, to general gratitude to the Creator. It was developed as "day unto day uttered speech, and night unto night showed knowledge." (Ps. xix. 2, B. Vers.). Indeed it would be absurd to suppose that all the laws called Natural or Moral manifested themselves in man's heart at once. They would, at least the greater part of them would, have been unmeaning to him, antecedently to experience, and could only have dawned upon him as society expanded. There was nothing to provoke their violation. The ideas could not at first have suggested themselves of honoring parents, or abstaining from adultery, covetousness, theft, or false testimony, or even depriving of life, (for death had not entered into the world). On the same principle, I submit, Adam could not have understood a positive command to rest on the seventh day, before the cycle of days had begun, or labour had become laborious

enough to necessitate repose. Instincts implanted by the Creator expanded as circumstances called them forth, into the recognition of what we call moral commandments; but no instinct whatever could, without express revelation, expand into the recognition of the seventh day, as God's day. It is necessary to insist upon this, because, from the point which some persons make of establishing the morality in toto of the Fourth Commandment, and their indisposition to be contented with the acknowledgment of a moral element in it, one would suppose them to hold that the Decalogue was imprinted in a formal shape, as the foundation of all morality, on the hearts of our first parents. Virtually, whatever is moral in the Decalogue was there. Formally, very little was there. (Of course, I do not mean to say that no positive precept could be understood by Adam. He had one given to him which he could understand-to abstain from the fruit of a tree obvious to his senses-and he broke it, transgressing thereby one of the few moral obligations of which he was as yet conscious, the obligation to obey his Maker. All I am contending for is, that whatever determination. we come to, as to the origin of the observance of the Sabbath Day, such observance was not a matter of natural or moral law, at any rate as to its circumstances. Those circumstances I hold to be, first the particular day, and then the manner in which it was to be observed).

My position may be further illustrated by the words of Hooker. Even nature," (he says), "has taught the heathens. . . . first, that festival solemnities are a part of the exercise of religion; secondly, that praise, liberality and rest are as natural elements whereof solemnities consist." (v. 70. 5). Nature did not teach even these things in the earliest spring of mankind, but they are founded on the natural or moral instincts to which we have already adverted, and therefore are natural or moral in a sense in

which the direction of these instincts to the seventh day, or even to one day in seven, can never be. That this is not natural is evident from a consideration strongly put by Archbishop Bramhall,277 that the old-world fathers from Adam to Moses are not represented as keeping the Sabbath-day, which we may suppose they would have done, had the obligation been discoverable from within. "We find," (says he), "oblations, and priests, and sacrifices, and groves or oratories, and prayers, and thanksgivings, and vows, and whatsoever natural religion doth dictate about the service of God; but we find not one instance of the execution of this supposed law of the seventh-day Sabbath." I may add, that had the law of its observance been natural or moral, the heathen of Canaan, who are reproached and with singular minuteness, for many transgressions of the law of nature, and were therefore cast out before the children of Israel, would surely have been reproached for transgression of this. Now they are nowhere so reproached. Had it again been one of the laws of nature, there would not, I humbly conceive, have been assigned as reasons for its observance, in one passage, a fact which could not have been known except by revelation, "God's working six days and resting the seventh; in another, a fact which occurred long after man was created, and in which not humanity in general, but one nation only was interested. "God brought thee forth out of Egypt, therefore God commanded thee to keep the seventh day." (Deut. v. 15).

But, though the Sabbath was not a natural or moral. institution, was it not appointed so early in the world's history, that, positive though it be, it may be almost deemed a part of man's nature, and so, binding upon mankind for ever? Do we not read in Genesis ii. 3,278 that "God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it He had rested from all His work which