mansions of unfading light and unalloyed blessedness where labor and sorrow can never enter. Blessed prospect! May it brighten more and more each hour in the vision of faith. May we labor all the more earnestly and faithfully, as being sure of this most precious rest at the end. True, there are foretastes of the eternal Sabbath; but these foretastes only cause us to long more ardently for the blessed reality--that Sabbath which shall never be broken--that "holy convocation" which shall never be dissolved. We have already remarked that the Sabbath occupies quite a unique and independent place in this chapter. This is evident from the wording of the fourth verse, where the Lord seems to begin afresh with the expression, "These are the feasts of the Lord," as if to leave the Sabbath quite distinct from the seven feasts which follow, though it be, in reality, the type of that rest to which those feasts so blessedly introduce the soul. "These are the feasts of the Lord, even holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their seasons. In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the Lord's passover." (Ver. 4, 5.) Here, then, we have the first of the seven periodical solemnities--the offering of that paschal lamb whose blood it was that screened the Israel of God from the sword of the destroying angel on that terrible night when Egypt's first-born were laid low. This is the acknowledged type of the death of Christ, and hence its place in this chapter is divinely appropriate. It forms the foundation of all. We can know nothing of rest, nothing of holiness, nothing of fellowship, save on the ground of the death of Christ. It is peculiarly striking, significant, and beautiful to observe that, directly God's rest is spoken of, the next thing introduced is the blood of the paschal lamb. As much as to say, There is the _rest_, but here is your _title_. No doubt labor will _capacitate_ us, but it is the blood that _entitles_ us, to enjoy the rest.