I daresay some, probably most, of you have read that amongst the horrors of the French Revolution the Sabbath was abolished together with all the services of religion. I do not wish to enter into detail or to picture the horrible scenes which followed, but as there is a tendency amongst a large class of persons to undervalue the Sabbath in its hallowed character, it is well for us to glance at the state of France during its abolition. Listen to a few words only. “The services of religion were now universally abandoned. The pulpits were deserted through all the revolutionised districts; baptisms ceased; the burial service was no longer heard; the sick received no Communion; the dying no consolation. A heavier anathema than that of papal power pressed upon the peopled realm of France—the anathema of Heaven, inflicted by the madness of her own inhabitants. The village bells were silent; Sunday was obliterated; infancy entered the world without a blessing; age left it without a hope. On every tenth day a revolutionary leader ascended the pulpit and preached Atheism to the bewildered audience. On all the public cemeteries the inscription was placed, ‘Death is an eternal sleep.’” I should not like to shock your ears or to leave with one of our twilight gatherings such memories as would haunt you, were I to continue my quotation; so I have only given a faint glimpse of a country without a Sabbath and its gracious Giver. May the little help us to realise more fully the preciousness of His first gift to mankind. I wonder if you, my dear girl friends, have ever thought of a fact which establishes the Divine origin of the Sabbath. You know how we measure our years, calendar months and days, and how these periods are accounted for by the journeying of the earth round the sun, and other movements and positions which regularly recur. But there is nothing to divide week from week, or to mark a definite period of seven days, save the Divine example and the Divine command, as recorded in the Bible. The story of God’s creative work during six days, and of His resting and sanctifying the seventh, the commandment, “Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God,” are our only warrant for the division of time which we call a week. The lunar month divided by four will not give fully seven days. The calendar months are of unequal lengths, and even the year cannot be divided into so many exact weeks. This fact may be already known to most of you, but you may have gone over the figures many a time without saying to yourselves, “The movements of the earth and her attendant moon mark various periods, but never an exact term of seven days. For this division we must refer to God’s word and His command to give six days to work and the seventh to rest.”