What varied agencies is not the Sabbath calling into operation, to press forward and give fresh impulse to the onward movement! Not only is the stolid mind of the untaught workman aroused, impelling motive and untiring energy imparted, to carry him on in the upward path of self-improvement; but the sympathies of his nature are also awakened, and, looking on the moral and intellectual degradation, and the physical wretchedness around him, his heart is yearning over his fellow-men, and the weekly rest affording him time, he is stretching out the hand of a brother to those who are sunk in ignorance and vice, he is pointing the upward path, and stimulating to the upward movement. See that young man, whose daily earnings, perchance, are needful, not merely for his own support, but it may be, for the support of aged parents, or of young and helpless brothers and sisters; the circumstances of whose early years had prevented his enjoying more than the limited advantages of a common grammar-school education, or, perhaps, not even allowed of his receiving so much as a common school education, but whose knowledge has been picked up in Sabbath classes, or at the fireside of hard-working parents, whose straitened circumstances required that even in his boyhood he should strain every nerve to assist them in supplying, by his labour, the wants of a young and numerous family: he is not only walking steadfastly and firmly himself in the path of improvement, but taking the lead, and urging on his fellow-men, devoting his little hour of Sabbath rest, and Sabbath leisure, not to mere repose, or sensual indulgence, but gathering his fellow-men around him that he may reason with them out of the Scriptures, or calling together, for instruction, a class of ragged, untrained children, or wending his way to yonder wretched garret, or that damp cellar, where want, disease, and vice have taken up their abode together, that he may ascertain why that squalid child was absent from the Sabbath-school class, and drop a word of encouragement to the boy, or address a word of warning and entreaty to the parents. Who has not felt convinced, on viewing scenes like these, agencies like these called into operation, that it is the weekly rest in the hands of living, active religion, which is destined to reach the very lowest depths of society, to lift humanity from the degrading pollutions of vice, and from the servile dependence and helplessness of ignorance; and that to take from the children of toil the Lord’s-day, were to take from them at once the means of self-improvement, and also the opportunity of doing anything towards the improvement of others?