The circumstances out of which the following Essay, with its accompanying Sketch of the Author’s Life, originated, are as remarkable as they are deeply interesting and hopeful. Jealous for the honour of God’s Sabbath, which men of the world were periling--jealous for the privileges to man conferred by the Sabbath--jealous for the labouring man, whose feelings respecting the Sabbath were often misrepresented to his disadvantage, a layman resolved to afford an opportunity for the working classes to speak their own mind freely on the matter, and to bear their testimony to the blessings and privileges of the day, and thereby to the glory of God, the author and giver of it. With these views, he put forth a proposal, about the end of the year 1847, offering three prizes--of £25, £15, and £10, respectively--for the three best Essays on the subject, written by labouring men. Although this is the first instance upon record of persons of that class being invited to become competitors in literature, and for literary honours; and although comparatively a very brief time was allowed for preparing and sending in the Essays, yet three months--the first three of the year 1848--sufficed to produce the astonishing number of more than nine hundred and fifty compositions, manifesting by the single fact, without reference to the merits of these productions, the wide-spread interest and deeply-rooted principles with which the holy day of God is reverenced, loved, and honoured, by the labouring people. Amongst the Essays received was one from a female, accompanied by a letter, which will be found at the conclusion of this Introduction, and which the reader will peruse with interest, as indicating the habitual tone of Divine and filial piety which pervades the mind of the writer. The Essay itself was found to be correspondent in tone and spirit with the letter. It is, indeed, a composition of no ordinary kind, whether we regard the source from whence it came, the instructive matter it contains, or the manner in which the materials are worked up in the composition, and the diction in which they are expressed. The Adjudicators, although, in faithfulness to the other competitors, constrained to lay it aside, as the work of a female, yet felt at the same time that it was a production which ought not to be withheld from the world, and that it was a duty as much to humanity as to the talented writer herself, not to suffer it to return to privacy and forgetfulness. It was, therefore, proposed to her to allow of its publication, independently of the forthcoming Prize Essays when adjudged, and she was requested, at the same time, to write a sketch of her life to prefix to the Essay when published. In both of these proposals she willingly acquiesced; and the reader has before him two equally remarkable and interesting compositions, the Essay and the Sketch.[1]