It is quite impossible to over-estimate the value and importance of the Lord's day, ([Greek: he kyriake hemera,]) as the first day of the week is termed, in the first chapter of the Apocalypse. Being the day on which Christ rose from the dead, it sets forth not the completion of creation, but the full and glorious triumph of redemption. Nor should we regard the celebration of the first day of the week as a matter of bondage, or as a yoke put on the neck of a Christian. It is his delight to celebrate that happy day. Hence we find that the first day of the week was pre-eminently the day on which the early Christians came together to break bread; and at that period of the Church's history, the distinction between the sabbath and the first day of the week was fully maintained. The Jews celebrated the former, by assembling in their synagogues to read "the law and the prophets;" the Christians celebrated the latter, by assembling to break bread. There is not so much as a single passage of scripture in which the first day of the week is called the sabbath day; whereas there is the most abundant proof of their entire distinctness. Why, therefore, contend for that which has no foundation in the Word? Love, honor, and celebrate the Lord's day as much as possible; seek, like the apostle, to be "in the Spirit" thereon; let your retirement from secular matters be as profound as ever you can make it; but while you do all this, call it by its proper name; give it its proper place; understand its proper principles; attach to it its proper characteristics; and, above all, do not bind down the Christian, as with an iron rule, to observe the seventh day, when it is his high and holy privilege to observe the first. Do not bring him down from heaven, where he can rest, to a cursed and bloodstained earth, where he cannot. Do not ask him to keep a day which his Master spent in the tomb, instead of that blessed day on which he left it. (See, carefully, Matt. xxviii. 1-6; Mark xvi. 1-2; Luke xxiv. 1; John xx. 1, 19, 26; Acts xx. 7; 1 Cor. xvi. 2; Rev. i. 10; Acts xiii. 14; xvii. 2; Col. ii. 16.)