before and after the deluge,—such as Noah sending out the dove again “after other seven days,”—we find the Jews actually keeping a Sabbath in the wilderness of Sin, before the covenant of Sinai had been entered into. Thus, at the giving of the manna, we have Moses saying unto the people, _To-morrow is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord_: _on that day ye shall not find it in the field_: _for the Lord hath given you the Sabbath_: _therefore He giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days_:—language plainly implying that, at that time, the Sabbath was an established observance of the religious life. What shall we say, then, of those _subsequent_ reasons for the institution which connect it with a peculiar national covenant? or with the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage? Why, not that they are meant to be reasons for the institution _itself_, but reasons for a particular time and form of its _re-promulgation_. The children of Israel, it is to be remembered, had been for several hundred years under captivity in Egypt. Many of their ordinances, it is likely they would have forgotten; and their Sabbaths, it is all but certain, their task-masters would not permit them to observe. On their Exodus, therefore, it became necessary that there should be a formal _re-enactment_ of the holy day; not only by a repetition of those moral considerations, on account of which the Almighty had originally set it apart, but also with a recital of such other arguments as should make the sanctity of the day especially binding upon _them_ as a nation; namely, that in their revived and perpetuated Sabbath, they were to keep up a grateful commemoration of their deliverance from Egypt, as well as behold a standing pledge or seal of the covenant into which God was then entering with his people. To infer that mankind had never observed a day of sanctified rest until the Sabbath was made a sign of the covenant with Moses, would be as unreasonable as the inference that the sun’s light had never been refracted in the rain-drops, until God set his “bow in the clouds,” to be a sign of his covenant with Noah. It pleased God to take an existing moral fact in the one case, as He had taken an existing physical fact in the other, to be a perpetual and visible memorial of his own gracious purposes. And, surely, to the Israelites, in all ages, it must have been a great encouragement to see the promise made unto their fathers guaranteed by a seal, which was honoured as the first token ever made to human kind, and hallowed by considerations which could never change, and never lose their force.