While we look around us, we everywhere see the blessed results of the Sabbath rest when properly employed, the woeful consequences of its sacred hours encroached on, whether by the drudgery of toil or the debasement of licentiousness. See that home where domestic comfort dwells, where well-ordered decorum reigns, and where the parent and the child have alike their part assigned to them from day to day. Be sure that the Sabbath is there observed; the very peace which prevails around you in that abode, is a portion of the Sabbath itself spread over the week.[15] But see that other home where squalid wretchedness, perhaps unholy riot, reigns. See children neglected, see character lost, see poverty bringing woe in its train--a woe which is gradually rising like an ingulfing[*6] tide upon the inmates, till at last they are steeped to the lip in misery. See a wife worse than widowed amid the brutalities of that home; or, more degrading still, see her uniting with her guilty partner in godless revelry, till, like the meeting of fires, the two together waste and consume every vestige of what is pure, and lovely, and of good report. Now, while you gaze upon that scene, be sure that the sacred hours of the Sabbath are disallowed[*7] there; they are squandered in licentiousness, and perverted into the means of ruin. In brief, the Sabbath is there trodden under foot. The ungodliness of the week grows deeper and darker on the Lord's own day, because the abuse of the best things turns them into the worst; and accumulated crime, like a swollen river, sweeps the inmates at last, some to prison, some to an hospital, some to exile, some to death. GALILEO'S FIRMNESS. And these, and a thousand similar cases, warn us in the workshop to prize the day of rest. It frees the sons and daughters of toil for a little from the burdens of earth. It braces their mind for the struggle with sin throughout the week. It enables them to clothe themselves with the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left. It affords an opportunity for anchoring the soul to the Rock of Ages. If employed as it ought to be, that day, which is not ours, but the Lord's, who claims a seventh portion of our time as peculiarly his own, will arm the mind for meekly but resolutely putting away at once the wiles and the assaults of the godless. "I know in whom I have believed," may be the reply of the godly artizan to all the gainsayers; and he may thus proceed upon his way as a believer, as unmoved either by the scorn or the assault of the infidel or the licentious, as Galileo was unshaken amid all the persecutions of popery, when he told the world the true theory of the skies. In a word, with the Bible open before us, and the mind of God for our standard there, he is at once the strongest and the happiest Christian who has best learned to practise what John taught by his example, "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day." THE CHURCH OF THE OUTCAST.