9. Nor does the Saviour even leave the subject here; for he adds: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” If the Sabbath was _made_, certain acts were necessary in order to give existence to it. What were those acts? (1) God rested upon the seventh day. This made the seventh day the rest-day or Sabbath of the Lord. (2) He blessed the day; thus it became his holy day. (3) He sanctified it, or set it apart to a holy use; thus its observance became a part of man’s duty toward God. There must be a time when these acts were performed. And on this point there is really no room for controversy. They were not performed at Sinai, nor in the wilderness of Sin, but in paradise. And this is strikingly confirmed by the language here used by the Saviour: “The Sabbath was made for THE man, not THE man for the Sabbath;”[257] thus citing our minds to the man Adam that was made of the dust of the ground, and affirming that the Sabbath was made for him; a conclusive testimony that the Sabbath originated in paradise. This fact is happily illustrated by a statement of the apostle Paul: “Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”[258] It will not be denied that this language has direct reference to the creation of Adam and Eve. If then we turn back to the beginning, we shall find Adam made of the dust of the ground, Eve taken from his side, and the Sabbath made of the seventh day.[259] Thus the Saviour, to complete the solution of the question raised by the Pharisees, traces the Sabbath back to the beginning, as he does the institution of marriage when the same class proposed for his decision the lawfulness of divorce.[260] His careful statement of the design of the Sabbath and of marriage, tracing each to the beginning, in the one case striking down their perversion of the Sabbath, in the other, that of marriage, is the most powerful testimony in behalf of the sacredness of each institution. The argument in the one case stands thus: In the beginning God created _one_ man and _one_ woman, designing that they two should be one flesh. The marriage relation therefore was designed to unite simply two persons, and this union _should_ be sacred and indissoluble. Such was the bearing of his argument upon the question of divorce. In relation to the Sabbath, his argument is this: God made the Sabbath for the man that he made of the dust of the ground; and being thus made for an unfallen race, it can only be a merciful and beneficent institution. He who made the Sabbath for man before the fall saw what man needed, and knew how to supply that want. It was given to him for rest, refreshment, and delight; a character that it sustained after the fall,[261] but which the Jews had wholly lost sight of.[262] And thus our Lord lays open his whole heart concerning the Sabbath. He carefully determines what works are not a violation of