But the seventh day, then, if we will use it thus, is _ours_ as well as _his_; it is _ours_ more than all the six which go before: it is _ours_ in its own sublime, peculiar sense, to give us a foretaste of eternity by withdrawing us from temporal things; in short, it is one of the best gifts of God to man. O taste and see how gracious the Lord is! The Sabbath is to his own glory; but what would man be without it? The most wretched of beings in every way; worn out before his usual allotted time with unintermitted toils; brought down to the grave by a premature old age and decay; and, what is still worse for him, with diminished hopes of happiness in another and a better world. The Sabbath, thanks be to God! brings with it, if we will, a sweet, a tranquil, a refreshing rest: it repairs and renews the languishing, the broken powers of body and of mind; it sends us forth again to our duties on the following day with new strength, and a new spirit, more adequate to the performance of them; cheerfulness sits upon our brow, instead of a perpetual gloom; health, instead of the sad hue of a thousand maladies, which never-ending, never-pausing labour must have necessarily produced. And if the Sabbath has been spent as God intends that it should be spent, no small advance has been made towards some happy mansion in our eternal abode. We have heard, we have read, we have thought much about our blessed Redeemer—about our own salvation—about the bliss and glory of heaven. We have put ourselves into every way, private and public, of receiving every grace of which we stand in need, and which God, through Christ, has promised to bestow. We have prayed more at home than the business of the world will permit us to do on any other day; we have assembled in the church, as often as the church was open, to receive the mercies to which we are entitled, by God’s gift, only as we are members of the church; we have confessed our sins there with bended knees and a penitent heart; we have said with heartfelt thankfulness, “Amen,” to the covenanted pardon of God announced by the minister of Christ; we have partaken of all the divine ordinances blameless; if the holy table was decked, we have feasted upon the heavenly banquet of our great Saviour’s body and blood. These have been the holy deeds of the well-spent day; and holy deeds like these will qualify us for the rewards of eternity, if, under the continued influence of the Holy Spirit, encouraging, strengthening, and sanctifying us, we persevere unshaken in the same course to the end. The Sabbath-day, then, is ours more especially; God, in consecrating and hallowing it to himself, has done so to _our_ present and eternal profit. By means of it we perform the better all the business of men, all the business of Christians, all the business of those who aspire to heaven.