God blessed the Sabbath-day, and sanctified it for his own glory; but how does it promote his glory, whilst the generality of his faithless, ungrateful people, even in this Christian nation, never enter his sacred courts on that day, to give him the honour due unto his name in the presence of their fellow-men. And “shall I not visit for this, saith the Lord?” Much, indeed, very much is it to be feared, that he _will_ visit, with some terrible calamity too, and soon also, this country of ours, so dear to us all, so much our boast and pride, which he has hitherto guarded with an extraordinary protection, and exalted above other nations with unparalleled renown and power. The breach, the dishonouring of his Sabbaths, he will keenly resent, and unsparingly avenge. What he denounced to the Jews should perpetually sound in our ears—“Verily my Sabbaths shall ye keep for a perpetual covenant; they are a sign between _me_ and _you_ throughout your generations for ever; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you. They are holy unto you; every one that defileth them shall surely be put to death.” It is a despite done to God himself, directly and personally; it is a scorn both of his majesty and his goodness, which cannot but provoke him to consume the guilty in his wrath. Already, indeed, do we feel his wrath in part executed upon us, and in part behold it with terror suspended over us. The nightly incendiary, who prowls about in darkness (but God sees him) and destroys the fruits of the earth, which should have been for the food of man; the open rioter, who, in broad day-light, levels with the ground the temple of God, the marts of commerce, the mansions of the great, and puts to the hazard even the life of his beneficent neighbour; the wide-wasting pestilence, which, with havoc and death in its train, has reached the opposite shores, and now only waits the signal to cross the sea to ours; all these are the avenging emissaries of God; but the last more apparently; and I pray God, as King David did, that _we_ may fall into _his_ hands rather than into the hands of men—yet He, who stilleth the fury of the warring elements, can also still “the madness of the people.”