One fruitful source of Sabbath desecration is the unnatural condition in which men and women are compelled to live, in the heart of our great cities. Every thing around them blights the gentlest and most gracious thoughts and feelings of our nature. They live from hand to mouth—they snatch at each day’s existence—they have no rest, no sense of possession in the present, no hope for the future. They are out of reach of true rest on the Sabbath. It is mere mockery to talk about it. Keep them at home, and the Sabbath cannot be a delight, except when an enthusiastic spirit can wholly emancipate itself from circumstances. God’s ordinance seems to them a delusion and a snare. Picture the miserable houses, the foul air, the dirty, damp, mouldy walls, the reeking smoke, the pestilential exhalations from the open sewer, the cries of drunkenness, and the curses of blasphemy, amidst which we expect half a million of men in our metropolis to pass the Sabbath. No wonder that they fly from it, fly to the ale-house, and drown there their disgust and despair. They are hardly within reach of our Christian instructions,—alas, for the seed sown in such stony ground! The circumstances of their life expose it to fearful peril; a broad change must pass over the moral and mental condition of these people before, _as a class_, they can be expected to receive gladly the Gospel and bring forth its fruits. Let them get out to something they will care for—something that will teach them—God’s clear air and sunshine, the violet odour, balmy to them as the breath of Paradise, the bird song, the breeze among the boughs, the fresh clean meadows, the sparkling wreathing river, and they are at once within reach of better and holier thoughts. Or if no thoughts come to them, for impressions shape themselves into thoughts but slowly in minds inept, yet a genial refreshing dew has passed over their spirits—they feel that the city life, with its squalor and misery, is man’s work not God’s,—and at last, though the thought may be long in ripening, they may come to think that it may be true after all, as the Bible says, that in God the poor man has a defender and keeper, and a remedy for all the ills which sin and selfishness have entailed upon the world.