I. In trying to arrive at correct notions upon what may be due to the sacred day, and how far it may be lawful that churches and places of amusement should share its hours between them, our first thoughts are naturally directed to the Old Testament accounts of the Sabbath institution itself. Was its origin paradisaical, or patriarchal, or Levitical? And if it were either of these, were the reasons given for commencing it such as would pass away, when the dispensation under which it was given passed away? This question is important, because there is a current way of speaking of the Sabbath as if it were a mere festival of the Jewish Church, deriving its whole sanctity from the Levitical law, and only taken up by the Christian Church at second hand,—as among the _useful_ things of the old economy which it would be as well to perpetuate, though not one of the _binding_ things we were under any obligation to observe. Now, to expose the absurdity of this notion, we have only to take the earliest Scripture notices of the institution which come to hand. In the second chapter of the book of Genesis, at the close of the account of the creation, we read,—_And on the seventh day God ended his work which He had made_; _and He rested on the seventh day from all his work which He had made_. _And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it_: BECAUSE _that in it He had rested from all his work which God created and made_. If this passage stood alone, one conclusion only could be drawn from it; namely, that the institution of the Sabbath succeeded the creation immediately in order of time, and that it was sanctified for reasons which must be binding on all mankind alike. But other notices in the writings of Moses follow, which might seem to militate against this view, and even to favour the erroneous notion I have adverted to, of the Sabbath having only a temporary or dispensational sanctity. Thus, in the thirty-first chapter of Exodus, we read,—_Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath throughout their generations for a perpetual covenant_: _it is a_ SIGN _between me and the children of Israel for ever_. Whilst, further, in the book of Deuteronomy, at the fifth chapter, we find Moses exhorting the people to the observance of the holy day, with this added reason: _Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt_, _and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and stretched-out arm_; THEREFORE _the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath-day_. Now, whether we are able to give any satisfactory account of these additional reasons for the institution or not, the revealed fact will remain the same,—namely, that the Sabbath was _not_ Levitical in its origin, and was not even _first_ made known to the Jews, at the giving of the law. Nothing can be plainer than that the Sabbath was both known and observed before the Jewish Church had any existence. For, besides the incidental notices both