If we go to Rome, the centre and source of that gigantic superstition which flings its dark shadows over the continent of Europe, we find public “lotteries” in active operation on the Sabbath, over which cardinals themselves preside. And in Madrid, after mass is over, the Queen of Spain, surrounded by multitudes of her people, is present at the cruel and revolting bull-fight. And thus it is everywhere the spirit of Popery to mutilate the Sabbath. If it be said this laxity prevails also in Protestant countries of the continent, for this a twofold reason may be assigned:—first, because the German Reformers, not excepting Luther himself, gave an uncertain sound on the obligations of the Sabbath, and retained so much of the system they had abandoned as to leave to their countrymen a low and imperfect standard of Sabbath observance; and, above all, because the spirit of the Reformation is dead in Germany, Rationalism has taken the place of Evangelism, and “the salt has lost its savour.” It is encouraging to know that, wherever evangelical truth has been revived on the continent, there also is waking up a corresponding zeal for the sanctification of the Lord’s day. Popery, then, has always robbed God of half his own day; and wherever this sacrilege is perpetrated, His judgments have been poured forth. As is attested by the history of Israel in the days of old, as well as by that of France, and Italy, and Spain, and of our own country in the days of the Stuarts, when semi-Popery tyrannised over its victims in the oppression and murder of the Covenanters of Scotland and of the Puritans of England, when the first Charles perished on the scaffold after long and bloody civil wars, and the second Charles, (whose personal profligacy almost corrupted a whole nation, and who, as Pepys so graphically records,) was smitten by the hand of death as he sat, surrounded by his paramours, at the gambling-table, on the Sabbath eve, in “that glorious gallery” of Whitehall Palace; in the judgments that came upon dynasties and nations, as such, at these and other periods in connexion with Sabbath desecration—we are forcibly reminded that the “Lord of the Sabbath day,” seated at the Father’s right hand, can, as the divine word so awfully expresses it, “strike through kings in the day of His wrath,” and “dash” His enemies “in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” The whole Sabbath, then, belongs to God; we claim the whole of it for the concerns of the soul and of eternity, and any secular infringement of it must be an act of rebellion against the sovereignty of the Most High.