IV. _The Sabbath law admits of no compromise either with the claims of covetousness on the one hand_, _or of sinful pleasure on the other_. Not with covetousness, for it is written, “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” Often have such compromises been attempted by individuals and by communities, but upon them the God of heaven has ever frowned. Ye railway directors, who overwhelm with a storm of ridicule the faithful few who oppose the running of trains on the Sabbath day, what “fruit have ye had” even as to success in your speculations? Ye “looked for much, and lo! it came to little;” and “why?” saith the Lord of Hosts; “because I did blow upon it.” And are there now men who, while they call their palace “the people’s palace,” and themselves “the poor man’s friends,” yet depend mainly on _the poor man’s shillings_ to swell their dividends? “O! my soul; come not thou into their secret, unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united!” Neither, again, will this law of the Sabbath “shake hands” with those who “are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.” “From such” an inspired apostle commands us to “_turn away_.” If you consider a whole Sabbath spent devoutly “a weariness,” and say, “When will it be over?”—if you prove by your practice that your attendance on the sanctuary during one part of the Sabbath is regarded by you as a kind of licence to spend the rest of the day in “doing your own pleasure,” then be assured that you furnish a fearful evidence that you are destitute of the spiritual tastes of “the new creature,” and that you are still “in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity!” And let none say that we desire to make the Sabbath a day of gloom and not of gladness. We desire that it should be consecrated to that God whose “ways are pleasantness,” and because it is “the day which the Lord hath made” to exult in its refreshing remembrances, in its blessed privileges, and in its hallowed anticipations. And thus counting the Sabbath “A DELIGHT,” the Christian can exclaim, “O day most calm and bright, The fruit of this, the next world’s bud; The endorsement of supreme delight Writ by a Friend, and with his blood; The couch of time; care’s balm and bay; The week were dark but for thy light, Thy torch doth show the way!”