He who would abolish the Sabbath, and distribute its hours among the days of the week, that he might increase the comfort, and improve the character and the condition of working men, would act as a builder would do, who should dig up the foundations of a house, that he might obtain materials wherewith to finish its upper story. Religion, like the Father of lights, from whom it emanates, bestows abundance of blessings upon many who know not the bounteous Hand from whence they come; and the Sabbath, one of its most glorious and beneficent institutions, confers numerous benefits even upon that portion of society who, trifling with its sacred obligations, and spurning its salutary restraints, fail to reap from it that amount of good which it is so well calculated to afford them. We can form no just estimate of what the condition and circumstances of the human race would have been, if left entirely destitute of religion, from our intercourse with those who, though perversely refusing submission to its government, have, while their being was dawning, their mind and habits forming, been surrounded by its light and influences, and who, in their childhood and youth, have partaken largely of the blessings which this heaven-bestowed institution, the Christian Sabbath, affords. No; it is only from the condition and character of those tribes of mankind who have little or no vestige of revelation among them, that we are enabled to form a correct idea of what our state would have been, had the pure light of Christianity never dawned upon us. So, in like manner, in judging of the importance of this Divine institution, we must compare the condition and the habits of a labouring population who have never known a Sabbath, whose bodies the Sabbath rest has never refreshed, and whose minds Sabbath instruction and Sabbath exercise have, to no extent, strengthened or cultivated, awakened or enlightened. We must compare their character and condition, their hearths and homes, with the hearths and homes, the state and character, not of the mere Sabbath sleeper, or Sabbath dresser, or even of the mere church attender or sermon hearer, but of those who, with activity and energy, avail themselves of all the opportunities of self-improvement and family culture which the Christian Sabbath is so well fitted to afford, before we can have any correct idea of even the merely temporal benefits which the Sabbath is calculated to confer upon the labouring population, or of the immense loss its discontinuance would prove to the temporal interests of society.