nature, together with the legitimate au- | est education of their individual nature. thority of custom, which approves its Such a view of the morning life of manutility from the wide experience of many kind, even after it had been overcast by centuries, and defends its sacredness by the baleful shadow of sin, commends the powerful associations of established itself at once to our reason, as conformable with our views of God, and our acquaintance with the insidious and rapidly deteriorating power of sin. usage. The first ground has been vigorously disputed, but after patient investigation we are deeply impressed with its completeness and compact invulnerable strength. We would not, however, dogmatize where so many eminently devout men have expressed an opposite opinion, and where great difficulties avowedly exist. We cannot enter into the details of the many-voiced argument which establishes the Biblical authority of the Sabbath, but wish rather to exhibit some of the leading principles and facts which bear especially on the aspect which this controversy has recently assumed in relation to the following topics: The preMosaic existence of the Sabbath-The place which the Sabbath held in the Mosaic law-Does the fulfillment of that law confirm or abrogate it ?-The facts which are made known concerning the Sabbath in the Apostolic Church. I. The pre-Mosaic existence of the Sabbath is the first point for our consideration. The Bible representation of the early history of man shows him sinking from the pure knowledge and high civilization which he possessed, even after the Fall, into the ignorance and savageness of Heathenism. Science long mocked this humbling representation as an absurd fiction; and, in the proud hope of man's endless advancement, pictured him as slowly emerging from the "slough and crust" of barbarity in which he was created, to his present rank and polish. It is now, however, self-convinced by the truth which it scorned; and has proved by many collateral evidences, gathered from history, philology, and antiquities, that the most degenerate tribes have fallen from a civilization they once possessed; and that every new civilization which has sprung up in the world has drawn its inspiration from a foreign source. It accords, therefore, with the scientific as well as the Biblical account of man's earliest history, (1.) That the laws which were in force among men were received immediately from God; and, (2.) Were framed with a view both to their most perfect social happiness, and to the high These two points which are deduced from the simple facts of Bible History and the recent conclusions of science, seem to us of much importance. If the first men were born in possession of such high mental and moral characteristics, and if in their young society there was that knowledge of letters, of arts, of social relations, and of religious duty, which we esteem as the richest fruits of civilization, it is manifest that they were supernaturally endowed by God with these unbought blessings. The inspiration of the first civilization on earth was from heaven. That it should be so is no more wonderful than that the first man should be created of manly stature, and with fully developed intelligence; or that there should be a creation at all. The laws, therefore, which directed that primitive society of men in the cultivation of their own nature and the regulation of their mutual intercourse, must have been revealed directly from God. How they were communicated by Him, and how they were preserved by men, are questions that can be answered only by conjecture. But we may be assured that, since they were the product of Infinite Wisdom, and were given to men when nearest their normal perfection, they must have been adapted to that exalted condition, and been intended to secure and advance it. It is quite true that the race rapidly degenerated; but we know that it was by abandoning the laws of God, obedience to which would have preserved them in their earliest and purest civilization. We now perceive the rationale of Dr. Paley's assertion, that if the Sabbath was instituted immediately after the Creation, it must be esteemed as obligatory on the whole race in all generations. "If the Divine command," he writes, "was actually delivered at the Creation, it was addressed, no doubt, to the whole human species alike, and continues, unless repealed by some subsequent revelation, binding upon all who come to the knowledge of it;" not only because it exists an unrepealed command, but because it was bound up with the best interests of men, was given by an all-wise God, in order to defend them, and was broken with the certain result of sacrificing the benefits which He purposed it to secure. In other words, if God in these early times instituted a Sabbath, it was because it was necessary for the physical and spiritual well-being even of those who had a strength and completeness of body and soul, which none of their descendants have attained. So that if necessary for them, it must be, à fortiori, necessary for us. And if its abandonment were one cause of the loss of the purity, knowledge, and physical vigor which they possessed, our adherence to it will be necessary in order to retain such of these blessings as we yet enjoy. If in that early civilization God appointed a Sabbath for bodily repose, and especial spiritual exercises, He has plainly indicated that mankind will never be able to dispense with its recurrent privileges. The curse of sin was felt less after its immediate infliction than it has been since; and if the labor it imposed was then mitigated to all by one day's rest, and the spiritual weakness it entailed was helped by the special aid of one day's sanctity, surely the need has become more imperative now that the weight of that curse presses more heavily upon men. We are interested, therefore, to know, whether the Sabbath is an institution coëval with the existence of man; and was revealed as one of the laws whereby God, at the very first, sought to direct and guard man in the attainment of the highest excellence and happiness. We are continually finding reminiscences of a pure theology and morality among the most degraded idolatrous nations-waifs that have floated down the dark stream of tradition, from the bright morning-land of their birth. These relics, discovered in every quarter of the globe, are most valuable, as illustrating the common origin of mankind, and the high sphere of civilization from which they have fallen. By comparing these, as they lie, like fossil ruins, amid the low and putrid superstitions in which they are imbedded, we have not only proof of the fact of an early civilization, but have actual remains of the forms of lifespiritual conceptions, laws, institutions, etc., with which it abounded. We think that such comparative his tory establishes the existence of a hebdomadal division of time in the primordial society of mankind, ere they were sundered and scattered over the face of the earth; and we must contend that no fact explains this division save the institution of a weekly Sabbath. Throughout all the nations of the East-the Hindoos, the Assyrians, Egyptians, etc.-days are summed up into weeks. Oldendorf found this arrangement in Central Africa; and it has also been discovered in the distant regions of Peru. Such agreement of customs was marvelous, and quite inexplicable, if we did not believe that these nations, however remote from each other, were branches of one parent stock, and carried with them the traditional usages of their common ancestors. It should be observed here, that the Eastern nations who remained near their first home, and have retained more of their original civilization, adopt without exception this division of time, which among the nations that wandered into America and Africa, becomes rarer and more indistinctly marked. The loss of such a usage among many of the degraded tribes is easily explained, if we consider how Heathenism has obliterated the higher conceptions of God and Divine service in which it originated; and that in the gross, brute-like blindness of their minds no distinctions of time were needful or cognizable. How, then, have these diverse nations adopted this division of time into weeks? There is only one solution of the problem, viz., that it was an arrangement in force from some cause or other in the earliest society of men, from which all these nations have proceeded. Some reason must be assigned for the fact, that nations so remote from one another, many of them sunk in barbarity, have fixed on one precise and peculiar mode of dividing their time. And what other reason can be suggested? They had no intercourse with each other. There is no cause arising from the necessary conditions of human existence, or the appearances of the world, which could originate or compel this unanimity. Some writers, indeed, imagine that the lunar month naturally divides itself into four periods of seven days each; and that from this cause all these nations, in perfect ignorance of each other, framed the obvious invention of the week. But the lunar month, occupying twenty-nine and a half days, more naturally divides itself into five weeks of six days each, or three weeks of ten days each, than into four weeks of seven days each. There are several combinations of multipliers which will make twenty-eight and thirty; and yet, of all these possible divisions, all nations have selected one, and that without concert or mutual acquaintance. Moreover, if we believe in the Bible doctrine of a common origin of mankind, we ought to have no difficulty here. In that earliest society they must have had certain distinctions of time; and nothing is more natural or likely than that, when separated, they should have carried these distinctions with them, until, in some instances, they were erased and forgotten amid the growing dissoluteness of their lives. But the question returns: Was the division into weeks formed by the institution of a weekly Sabbath in the time of our first parents and their children, or was it gradually introduced among them from some casual occurrence, or the observance of lunar changes? In reply, we submit the following considerations: equipped man with the appliances of civilization; and did not leave him to grope through the perils of infancy, and all the stages of ignorance, to the power, knowledge, and security which education and experience confer upon us. Adam and Eve were not self-taught, but were taught of God. Not only were their faculties matured at their creation; but that knowledge, which such maturity implies as its necessary element, was miraculously bestowed-possibly in the form of a temporary instinct, more ample in scope than that which the lower animals enjoy. On their expulsion from the garden, and amid the vicissitudes and dangers of their new condition, such miraculous knowledge was yet continued to them. The arts necessary to preserve and defend their life, and laws to regulate their personal and social duties, must have been taught them by revelation. Who taught Abel and Cain the meaning of sacrifice, and commanded them to present it? If we repudiate this belief, we must accept Monboddo's doctrine, that man is only a civilized monkey; or the doctrine of the Vestiges of Creation, that he is the latest, though not the last, development, in an endless seriesthe pupa between an ape and an angel. We therefore hold it to be altogether the most philosophical and consistent doctrine, 2. There is proof that the seventh day that God taught man the division of was regarded by many nations as a day time into weeks, and months, and years. in some measure sacred or distinct from This knowledge was essential in order to the others. This evidence is found among retain a distinct remembrance of the past, the early oriental nations, and classical or to forecast the future. At least it is as nations, with whom the early customs of certain that He gave them this knowledge, mankind were, from palpable reasons, long as that they spontaneously spoke a lanperpetuated. This points us to a simple guage, or were miraculously taught to work and intelligible cause of the original week. in wood and iron. When our first parents If every seventh day was distinguished were in the garden, they had the full comfrom the other days by some peculiar ob-plement of knowledge suited to their sinservance, it would become a conspicuous less state. When removed, they must mark in the calculation of time. All the days would be noticed in their relation to the seventh; and the intervals between these distinguished days would be regarded as separate parts of time. The sacredness which is attributed to the seventh day, conjoined with the general division of time into seven-day weeks, produces a strong conviction of the early institution of the Sabbath. 1. It is highly improbable that lunar changes should have originated this division of time, since it is about the most awkward and unsatisfactory of the many possible subdivisions of a lunar month. 3. Having traced back the invention of the week to the period of a normal civilization, we refer it without hesitation to God. The Bible, right reason, and science, assure us that God Himself have received the full complement of knowledge suited to their sudden helplessness. Were it not so, the stupor of crass ignorance would have fallen upon them; and, weak and inexperienced as infants, they would soon have perished from hunger or the ravin of wild beasts. 4. We are expressly informed in the Bible that God did, in the beginning of the world, consecrate to bodily repose and religious services the seventh day. This statement explains at once why nearly all nations, from the time of Noah downward, have divided their time into weeks; and why, in many countries which had no contact with the Jews, the seventh | works and in them. He thus made it a day was distinguished and revered as a blessed and a sacred day. That this is sacred day. Moreover, the appointment the meaning of these words, and that it of a Sabbath for these purposes harmonizes with all our conceptions of God, and with our consciousness of the duty and the need of man. This brings us, therefore, to the second and most explicit argument in proof of the primeval existence of a Sabbath, namely, the passage in Gen. 2 1, 2: "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done." We confess to be thoroughly dissatisfied with the mode in which M. Mellet, Mr. Dawson, and others, deal with this important text. An ingenuous reader can not resist the impression that Moses speaks of the sanctification of the seventh day, just as he had spoken of the occupation of other days; and that the seventh day signified was the day immediately succeeding the former six. This is the clear indubitable meaning of the sacred text. That Moses, having this belief concerning the original sanctification of the seventh day, should, in his law, ground the authoritative sanctity of the Sabbath upon it-or that God, having sanctified that day for mankind, should refer to its original institution as the basis of the Fourth Commandment, in His Sinaitic covenant, is most natural. Nay, we shall hereafter show that this was the very design of the separation of Israel, and the giving of the two tables of the covenant, to embody and conserve the Divine knowledge and institutions, given at first to mankind, but which gradually were disappearing amid their darkening godlessness. Further, this text manifestly refers to an appropriation of the day for special purposes relating to man. Days can have no reference to the indivisible eternity of God, save as He condescends to deal with the capacities and to arrange the duties of men, and therefore adopts the language proper to their operations. The words themselves prove this: "He blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it," words which, by their etymology and usage, can only mean that He set it apart for the solemn duties of religion, as the day on which they were to rejoice their souls in Him and His works, as He rejoiced in His was not the first seventh day alone, but every seventh day, that was consecrated, is finally put beyond the bounds of controversy by the promulgation of the Fourth Commandment, where the same words are expressly used-the terms being taken, doubtless, from its original institution-to declare the Divine appointment of the weekly Sabbath as a day of rest and religious enjoyment. This is a strictly necessary inference which no system of interpretation can impugn. What the words mean in Exod. 20:11, they must mean in Gen. 2: 3. If in the former they signify that the sanction of God sets apart every seventh day as a day of religious rest, they must mean the same thing in the latter. The fence reply to this simple reasoning saves those who use it only by overthrowing the validity and truthfulness of the Mosaic writings. It is affirmed that Moses, having proclaimed the law, in which the authority of the Sabbath is grounded upon God's resting on the seventh day and hallowing that day, when he afterwards wrote the yéveots of creation, inserted these words concerning the seventh day in the history, either as anticipatory of the subsequent consecration of that day, or for the dishonorable purpose of confirming his law by a gross deception on the people, stating that God had done at the beginning of the world what in fact was done nearly 3000 years after. Either of these suppositions does infinite wrong to the straight-forward record of Moses. In the first place, the words of the law spoken by God Himself expose their falsity. It is not said, For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blesses the Sabbath day and hallows it; but wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Whatever God, therefore, had said, or done concerning the seventh day, (and let it be remembered that this gives all the solemnity and authority to it even in the Jewish law,) had been said or done at the beginning of time. Instead of the statement in Genesis being proleptical, we are here by the word of God Himself carried back to it as the proper ground of the present law. So that, even if it had not been written, | lessness in the treatment of serious theolowe must have believed that the separation gical problems is unbearable. of the seventh day as a Sabbath was coeval with the existence of man. In reference to our present inquiry, which we wish to pursue with unswerving candor, having our own conscience to satisfy, we find the following paragraph in his second sermon: In the second place, the language of Moses in Genesis puts to shame, in its directness and simplicity, those who unfairly travesty his meaning. He may be mistaken; but manifestly his belief, whencesoever derived, is honestly expressed in that verse. Dr. Paley says: "As God did His work in the six days, and rested on the seventh, so for ever is this seventh day sanctified to man that he may rest from the six days' work, and celebrate his Maker's." We quote with pleasure the following passage from Dr. Wardlaw on this point: "So far as the mere terms of the record are concerned, (and it is of these alone we now speak,) there is just by the following startling announcement: He might well introduce this paragraph as much reason for considering the narration of Creation itself as narrated by anticipation, and as not taking place till 2500 years afterward, as there is for conceiving this to have been the case in regard to the institution of the day for its commemoration. The resting of Jehovah on that day, and blessing and sanctifying of that day, are alike related as having then taken place; there being no hint, and no change of construction indicative, in the remotest degree, of its being a mere allusion to what had no existence till twentyfive centuries had passed away; and then only in one nation, and for a limited time, as one of the institutes of a temporary ceremonial." Two conclusions are open to us if we reject the simple belief in Moses's inspired veracity. Either he was a silly, credulous enthusiast, who imagined God Himself to proclaim the law which asserts the ancient institution of the Sabbath, and so made that part of his fabulous history; or he was a crafty impostor, who palmed the law upon the Israelites as Divine, and fabricated his history to support the imposition. We must here advert to the opinions of the Rev. Baden Powell, which are adopted and circulated by the National Sunday League. Never was man more unsuited than Professor Powell for the high task of defining the connection of science with revelation, which he seems to arrogate to himself. There is a preposterous assurance in his manner of enunciating scientific truths which the disciple of science abhors; and his flippant reck "The disclosure of the true physical theory of the origin of the existing state of the earth entirely overthrows the supposed historical character of the narrative of the six days, and, by the seventh along with it; and thus subverts consequence, that respecting the consecration of entirely the whole foundation of the belief in an alleged primeval Sabbath coeval with the world and with man, which has been so deeply mixed up with the prepossessions of a large class of religionists." character of the Mosaic narrative, so strenuously "The inevitable rejection of the historical insisted on under older systems, can not but be regarded as a marked feature in the theological and spritual advance (!) of the present age.' Such a writer asks for no charity from his critics, and he deserves none. He makes sweeping assertions which threaten the most revered opinions of his fellowmen, and we require that his proofs be rigorously exacted and tried. As regards his science, then, does he make this disclosure of the true physical history of the origin of the existing state of the earth, which demolishes the historical validity of Moses's narrative? He does; and we confidently aver, that no geologist of distinction will subscribe to his theory: for theory it is, compounded of two parts, one glaringly absurd, and the other exceedingly improbable. Yet upon this monstrous, composite fiction Professor Powell would ride in triumph over the time-honored reputation of the Bible. He complacently styles the views he has put forth as among the fundamental truths acknowledged by every school; to question which would be to question, not only the whole of geology, but the very foundation of all inductive science. We wait in awe to learn what absolute truths he is about to propound, having a lurking conviction meanwhile that, whatever they may be, geologists of every school will not accept them; and we hear the following: |