I am not over-precise in outward observances; but I nevertheless welcome with joy unfeigned this first day of the week,--sweetest pause in our hard life-march, greenest resting-place in the hot desert we are treading. The errors of those who mistake its benignant rest for the iron rule of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently hedge it about with penalties and bow down before it in slavish terror, should not render us less grateful for the real blessing it brings us. As a day wrested in some degree from the god of this world, as an opportunity afforded for thoughtful self-communing, let us receive it as a good gift of our heavenly Parent in love rather than fear. In passing along Central Street this morning my attention was directed by the friend who accompanied me to a group of laborers, with coats off and sleeves rolled up, heaving at levers, smiting with sledge-hammers, in full view of the street, on the margin of the canal, just above Central Street Bridge. I rubbed my eyes, half expecting that I was the subject of mere optical illusion; but a second look only confirmed the first. Around me were solemn, go-to-meeting faces,--smileless and awful; and close at hand were the delving, toiling, mud-begrimed laborers. Nobody seemed surprised at it; nobody noticed it as a thing out of the common course of events. And this, too, in a city where the Sabbath proprieties are sternly insisted upon; where some twenty pulpits deal out anathemas upon all who "desecrate the Lord's day;" where simple notices of meetings for moral purposes even can scarcely be read; where many count it wrong to speak on that day for the slave, who knows no Sabbath of rest, or for the drunkard, who, imbruted by his appetites, cannot enjoy it. Verily there are strange contradictions in our conventional morality. Eyes which, looking across the Atlantic on the gay Sabbath dances of French peasants are turned upward with horror, are somehow blind to matters close at home. What would be sin past repentance in an individual becomes quite proper in a corporation. True, the Sabbath is holy; but the canals must be repaired. Everybody ought to go to meeting; but the dividends must not be diminished. Church indulgences are not, after all, confined to Rome.