the sick and the sorrowful are visited and comforted; neglected children are taught in the Sabbath-school; unreclaimed masses are evangelised in the mission district. The family once more re-assembles at the evening meal, and the Sabbath is closed with family worship, meditation, and secret devotion; and as the members of the household pass away to their nightly rest, it is felt that its hours have not been wearisome or unprofitable, but that they have in truth been all too short for the blessed work that was to be done in them. 3. It will not be wondered at, after these details, that in Scotland we claim the entire Sabbath for religion, not only because it forms part of our most sacred convictions that it has been so conferred upon us by the unrepealed act of Heaven, but also because _we are of opinion that, within narrower limits than this, the Sabbath must ever fail to work out, to its proper extent, all its beneficent designs_. Anything less than this would be something like placing the sun under a partial eclipse, which you yet expected to ripen the fruits of the world. Suppose the period of the Sabbath to be restricted, as some would wish, to the hours of public worship, and men suddenly to pass from business or pleasure to the sanctuary, and then to pass with equal suddenness from the sanctuary to business or pleasure again, even the benefit of the season of public worship would be more than half lost. Nature in most men is incapable of violent transitions; it must have its dawn and its twilight; and were our Sabbath to consist only of the time that we spent in the temple, the world would be far more likely to introduce its corrupting and debasing influence into the Church, than the Church to send out its healing streams upon the world. It is no mere theory or conjecture this; for the experiment was actually tried in England in the reign of our Sixth James, in the publication of "The Book of Sports," when it was sought to make games and morris-dances alternate on Sabbaths with public religious worship; and the effect was to neutralise the power of the pulpit, and to deluge the land with frivolity, irreligion, and vice. There must be the preparation and attuning of the mind for public devotion and instruction, by secret prayer and meditation; there must be the recollection and the holy repose of the soul afterwards; there must be the hallowed intermingling of deeds of charity with exercises of piety, and room for the revival and the play of home affections, if the Sabbath is to shed all the good which the beneficence of Heaven has put into it, upon churches and nations.