V. There are _pleas urged on behalf of this movement which demand our notice_. It may be said that “there are already laws on the Statute Book which license the opening of public-houses, the running of railway trains and of steam-boats, and that the sale of Sunday newspapers, and of a host of penny publications, many of which are most noxious in their tendency, is also sanctioned.” We reply that all such laws are unholy, Popish and not Protestant in their spirit and tendency, and that they directly assail the authority and perpetual obligation of the Divine law which says, “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy.” It was in the true spirit of the Reformation that the Founders of the Church of England instructed the minister to rehearse publicly the fourth commandment, and the people to respond, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” It was not from Puritanical strictness or Scottish bigotry, so called, but because the Bible was their pole-star, and the glory of God their aim, that the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, in their “Shorter Catechism,” taught the child to say, “The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting _all that day_, even from such recreations and employments as are lawful on other days, and the spending _the whole time_ in the public and private exercise of God’s worship, except so much as shall be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy.” But we may be told, again, that “the Sabbath is a Jewish institution.” We marvel that any should practically forget that the law of the Sabbath occupied a place on those tables of stone on which the Great Lawgiver inscribed a law with His own finger, which had nothing ceremonial, Jewish, or national in their aspect, which was constituted for all time, and which the Great Author of the New Testament dispensation declared that He “came not to destroy, but to fulfil.” No merely ceremonial institution, no “_positive_” and transitory law, could have had penalties so awful, or blessings so precious annexed to it, as we find attached to the Sabbath, and that before the advent of the Messiah, and throughout the whole course of Jewish national history. Born as the institution itself was, so to speak, in Paradise; recognised by patriarchs from Noah onward, as indicated by the division of time into weeks; lost and trampled down under the hoof of slavery in Egypt (as it has ever been where slavery has prevailed), but experiencing a resurrection in the wilderness, where Israel was free to serve and sacrifice, to worship and give praise to their fathers’ God—Sinai’s thunders but gave awful sanction and permanent establishment to a “law” which from the beginning had its moral claims over the whole race, and which, irrespective of all typical institutions, was intended for the race as such, and was thus emphatically “MADE FOR MAN.”