To these ends it is not enough that each one should determine for himself the portion and proportion of his own Sabbatical times. "Six days shalt thou labor; but the seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord." We urge it not as Scriptural proof--which would be contrary to the leading design and method of our argument--but as illustrative of the importance of one recurring period for all, and of the benefits to be derived from a community of act and feeling in its observance. We need all the strength that can come from a common prejudice, if any should choose so to call it, in favor of certain stated and well-known times. In distinction from the profanity that would utterly deny a Sabbath, there is a false hyper-spiritualism that would make all seasons, all places, and all acts, alike _holy_--or, in its sentimental cant, every day a Sabbath, every work a worship, and every feeling a prayer. Now, besides destroying the radical sense of the word _holy_, this is in opposition alike to Scripture and to human experience. Both teach us that there must be (at least in our present state) alternations of the holy and the common, the spiritual and the worldly, and that each interest is periled, as well by their false fusion, as by that destruction of the true analogy which would cause the one to be out of all proportion to the other. A stated period, too, is required to give intensity to thought and warmth to devotion. The greatest pleasure of a truly devout mind, is in the idea of contemporary communion with others, and nothing is more repugnant to it than a proud reliance upon its own individual spirituality. To give the day, then, all its rightful power over the soul, there is needed that hallowed character which can only come from what may be called a sacred conventionality. Every one who has been brought up in a religious community must feel the force of this, even if he does not understand its philosophy. In consequence of it, the Sabbath seems to differ, physically, as well as morally, from all other days. In its deep religiousness every thing puts on a changed appearance. Nature reposes in the embrace of a heavenly quietude. There seems to be a different air, a different sky; the clouds are more serene; the sun shines with a more placid glory. There is a holiness in the trees, in the waters, in the everlasting hills, such as the mind associates with no other period. Thousands have felt it, but never was it better described than in the lines of Leyden: With silent awe I hail the sacred morn, That scarcely wakes while all the fields are still; A soothing calm on every breeze is borne, A graver murmur echoes from the hill, And softer sings the linnet from the thorn, The sky-lark warbles in a tone less shrill-- Hail light serene! hail sacred Sabbath morn! Or in those verses of Graham, which, if an imitation, are certainly an improvement--especially in the moral conception which forms the close of his entrancing picture: