Now, let it be said, we have no desire to treat a serious subject lightly. But our friends insist on an interpretation of the fourth commandment which can hardly be treated seriously. We can scarcely blame Dr. Geo. Junkin for employing this shaft of ridicule. He says, substantially, suppose all our seventh-day Sabbatarians (and their number is not an insuperable objection to the experiment), having labored six days, according to the commandment, come to the night of Friday. By an excusable artifice, sponges, saturated with a powerful anæsthetic agent, are held to their noses, and they are laid up, in perfect unconsciousness, for a whole day beyond the close of their usual time of sleep. They awake, supposing it to be the seventh day of the week, as to them, so conscious intelligent beings, and subjects of law, it certainly would be to all intents and purposes. But in fact, by the actual measurement of time, it is the first day of the week. Might there not be in this way a practical solution of the whole difficulty? But the actual rising and the setting of the sun may be insisted on whether our seventh-day advocates are conscious or not. Suppose, then, that one of them takes the now rather popular trip of a tour round the world. Going west at the rate of, say thirty degrees a week, starting from New York, he would lengthen each of his days from sunrise to sunrise—supposing the sun to rise at six o’clock, local time, all along the belt of his course—a little over seventeen minutes; and thus, keeping his own count of time, and observing every seventh solar day, on his return to New York at the end of twelve weeks, his seventh-day Sabbath would really be the first day of the week. Though he might not be _mentally_ converted to the first-day theory of the Christian Sabbath, he would at least be _physically_ converted, and would either be compelled to accept the change, or make a week of six solar days to harmonize in Sabbath observance with his seventh-day brethren at home, or take to his journeying again, and complete the circuit of the earth in the opposite direction, in order to maintain unbroken the succession of weeks of seven days each, and have his Sabbath fall on the one and only day which will suit his interpretation of the fourth commandment. If, instead of going by the west, our traveler should go by the east, journeying at the same rate of thirty degrees each week, he would diminish the length of each of his days a little over seventeen minutes, and on arriving once more at New York, at the end of twelve even weeks by the time of that city, but twelve weeks and one day by his own time, his seventh-day Sabbath would fall on the sixth day of the week, and we would have a new order of Sabbatarians.