There is pretty strong inference that the antideluvians measured time by weeks from the account given by Noah, when the waters of the deluge began to subside. He "sent out a dove which soon returned." At the end of _seven_ days he sent her out again; and at the end of _seven_ days more, he sent her out a third time. Now why this preference for the number _seven_? why not five or ten days, or any other number? Can it be supposed that his fixing on upon _seven_ was accidental? How much more natural to conclude that it was in obedience to the authority of God, as expressed in the 2d chap. of Gen. A similar division of time is incidentally mentioned in Gen. xxix:--"fulfill her _week_ and we will give thee this also; and Jacob did so and fulfilled her _week_." Now the word _week_ is every where used in Scripture as we use it; it never means more nor less than _seven_ days (except as symbols of years) and one of them was in all other cases the Sabbath. But now suppose there had been an entire silence on the subject of the Sabbath for this twenty-five hundred years, would that be sufficient evidence that there was none. If so, we have the same evidence that there was no Sabbath from the reign of Joshua till the reign of David, four hundred and six years, as no mention is made of it in the history of that period. But who can be persuaded that Samuel and the pious Judges of Israel did not regard the Sabbath. What does God say of Abraham? that he "obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my _commandments_, my _statutes_ and my _laws_." (See what he calls them in Exo. xvi: 27, 30.) This, of course, includes the whole. Then Abraham reverenced God's Sabbath. Once more, there is no mention of the circumcision from the days of Joshua till the days of Jeremiah, a period of more than eight hundred years. Will it be believed that Samuel and David, and all those pious worthies with the whole Jewish nation, neglected that essential seal of the covenant for eight hundred years? It cannot be admitted for a moment. How [5]then can any one suppose from the alleged silence of the sacred history that Adam, Enoch, Noah and Abraham, kept no Sabbath, because the fact was not stated? If we turn to Jer. ix: 25, 26, we find that they had not neglected this right of circumcision, only they had not circumcised their hearts; so that the proof is clear, that silence respecting the keeping any positive command of God, is no evidence that it is not in full force.