This surface analogy rests on the deepest principles; and if, to any, this orderly procession of the Sabbaths seem a formalism, a yoke of bondage, then the day, the night, the periodic mealtime, the Christmas festival, the birthday greeting, must be to them a torment and an insult. The arrangements of all things must be, to such, a maddening discord. Even the primitive simplicities of barbaric existence, if they could recur to it, would not emancipate them. But such an experience might, perhaps, convince them, that these consecrations are the records of a vital progress—that these seasons, cut off from the lump of untrained, untrimmed, unformed existence, are the string courses of the masonry of that living temple of society, which mark the lines of its emergence from the dark ocean of primitive barbaric chaos and night. A tendency to think lightly of what has been consecrated by the religious feeling of the pious for long generations, is by no means a beautiful or commendable thing. We may be sure that some deep reason underlies the disposition of pious minds with one consent, through successive ages, to fall into a certain form or mode of action and thought. God has other ways of giving to the world commandments than by speaking or writing them. It is as distinctly a command of God to us to work by day and sleep by night, as if it had been written on the tables of stone; and any organized attempt to violate it exacts the penalties of a broken command. And God has given to all men an implicit direction to observe a Sabbath, in the instinct of its need which he has implanted in the constitution of humanity. This is witnessed even among the most degraded peoples, who have wandered farthest from the first condition, and most injured the original constitution, by means of the miserable substitutes wherewith they are fain to supply its place. But the question might fairly be asked here—“Is this all the obligation of the Sabbath day? Is it simply, that as sleep is good for the body every night, so it is good for man that, once in seven days, he should rest from his labours? If this be all, where is the religious obligation of the Sabbath?” No, this is not all. When we speak of a man resting from his labours, we speak of a _man’s rest_, and not of a brute’s. A brute rests from toil that he may renew the tension of his muscles; a man, that he may renew the tension of his soul. A _man’s_ work is not the work of his muscles only, nor is a _man’s_ life the life of a labourer, of a student, of a priest, but all these in unison. And when God said, “Thou shalt rest on the seventh day from all thy work,” he said it to _man_—to a being endowed with a spirit capable of “looking before and after,” capable of looking up to Him, whose natural and joyful employment, on his rest-days, should be to refresh his higher powers, by special direction of them to their appropriate objects, lest he should become embruted by his needful daily toil.