But each of these instances of training is even surpassed by that which God was pleased to impart respecting the mysterious Ordinance of the WEEK. Creation, Redemption, Sanctification--the three great phenomena of man's religious history--were all visibly based upon the Week. About the Creation, and its septenary commemoration as a religious ordinance, there is no real doubt whatever. In the Jewish system the sabbath, or week, is the basis upon which the whole structure rests.[4] And when the awful mystery of Redemption itself was to be consummated, it was once more within the limits of a single _week_ that the mighty drama was wrought out. From the early morning of Palm Sunday, when our Lord entered Jerusalem as the Lamb of God, Incarnate in order that He might suffer, to the early morning of Easter Day, when He rose from the dead, a measured week, rich in divine incident, ran out. Seven weeks, or a week of weeks, again elapses, and the Spirit is sent down from on high for the completion of the Church. All this indicates some deep mystery of blessedness as attaching to the seven-days period in the matter of man's relations to God. It cannot be alleged, indeed, as an absolute _proof_ that the celebration of the Eucharist was also meant to be of weekly recurrence, or that such recurrence would be the proper and indefeasible law of its rightful administration. But it surely renders that conclusion highly probable. For what purpose else, we may ask, was all this training given? Why was the Jewish nation, who were to be the first to receive the Gospel ordinances, and to transmit them to mankind, carefully habituated to a seventh-day rendering up of themselves to God? As regards the general principle involved, it was doubtless because it is good that man should keep with God these "short reckonings," which "make long" and eternal "friends." But besides this, it was, as the ancient Jewish services testify,[5] that they might keep in remembrance _two_ very wonderful weeks of divine operation on their behalf, the week of Creation, and the week of their own deliverance out of Egypt. What more likely than that a seventh-day observance was to be perpetuated still, only with reference to that antitypical Redemption, which itself also was ordained to take place, as if for this very purpose, within the compass of a week? [4] See this admirably worked out in Dr. Moberly's Sermons on the Decalogue. [5] See this proved at large in 'Principles of Divine Service,' vol. ii., pp. 284, _sqq._