In this hour of closure for my pastoral care among you, it may not be unseasonable to advert to things which have found their turns in hours of teaching and persuasion. Let me then entreat you to remember those first acts of grace, the early grounds of good hope, which made life itself, with all its seasons, a blessing, and, if rightly husbanded, the seed-plot of all blessings to the sons of men. Nothing but a new apostasy could destroy that hope, when the term of life was continued where it might have been cut short, in which case the human race would have been extinguished, and that triumph would have been given to the common foe to God and man. Nothing but a new apostasy from God would render man, in his state of promised rescue and encouragement and in the new term of his probation, an enemy to God. Before that horrible desertion from his worship, the Most High made his visit to the patriarchal altar, and gave that memorable declaration of his will, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?” The ground was laid in purpose and effect for that acceptance; and surely the assurance thus added was not for one family. Thus there is a Sabbath still set apart for a welcome day of rest, and for religious exercises; a day, the joy of which I have so often shared with you in these happy seasons of religious worship and communion. Remember the well-timed distinctions which He who was Lord also of the Sabbath-day, as the partner of his Father’s glory, prescribed for the right observance of the day, divesting it of its legal strictness and peculiarities, and still more protecting it, by an open vindication of its essential objects, from Jewish scruples and from Jewish superstitions. O look well to the duties of the Christian Sabbath! We want no traditionary warrant for its transfer to the glad day of the Redeemer’s resurrection. The Scriptures furnish plain and indubitable vestiges of that change. Look well to its salutary obligations, bound upon us by the twofold cogency of precept and example. Remember who it was, who, after the scene of his ministerial labours, kept his last Sabbath in the grave, and crowned with perpetual glory the day of his triumphant resurrection. Well might that day become not only the day of rest from labour, but a day of gladness and release from worldly cares and occupation, and, above all, the happy emblem of a rest from every evil work, a respite from a bondage worse than that of servile Egypt, a rest too from the galling yoke and ruling power of sin, which is the privilege of faith.