I cannot avoid thinking that many of our theologians attach a too narrow meaning to the remarkable reason “annexed to the Fourth Commandment” by the Divine Lawgiver. “God rested on the seventh day,” says the text, “from all his work which He had created and made; and God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.” And such is the reason given in the Decalogue why man should also rest on the seventh day. God rested on the Sabbath, and sanctified it; and therefore man ought also to rest on the Sabbath, and keep it holy. But I know not where we shall find grounds for the belief that that Sabbath-day during which God rested was merely commensurate in its duration with one of the Sabbaths of short-lived man,—a brief period, measured by a single revolution of the earth on its axis. We have not, as has been shown, a shadow of evidence that He resumed his work of creation on the morrow: the geologist finds no trace of post-Adamic creation,—the theologian can tell us of none. God’s Sabbath of rest may still exist;—_the work of REDEMPTION may be the work of his Sabbath day_. That elevatory process through successive acts of creation which engaged Him during myriads of ages, was of an ordinary week-day character; but in when the term of his moral government began, the elevatory process proper to it assumed the Divine character of the Sabbath. This special view appears to lend peculiar emphasis to the reason embodied in the commandment. The collation of the passage with the geologic record seems, as if by a species of re-translation, to make it enunciate as its injunction, “Keep this day, not merely as a day of memorial related to a past fact, but also as a day of coöperation with God in the work of elevation in relation both to a present fact and a future purpose. God keeps his Sabbath,” it says, “in order that He may save; keep yours also, in order that ye may be saved.” It serves, besides, to throw light on the prominence of the Sabbatical command, in a digest of law of which no part or tittle can pass away until the fulfilment of all things. During the present dynasty of probation and trial, that special work of both God and man on which the character of the future dynasty depends, is the Sabbath-day work of saving and being saved.[41]