a week-day; with no special day fixed for worship, they would have spent every day without worship. Their hearts were too dull for a devotion so spiritual

and pure.

Therefore, a law was given, specializing a day, in order to lead them to the broader truth that every day is God's.

. Now, so far as we are in the Jewish state, the fourth commandment, even in its rigor and strictness, is wisely used by us; nay, we might say, indispensable. For who is he who needs not the day? He is the man so rich in love, so conformed to the mind of Christ, so elevated into the sublime repose of heaven, that he needs no carnal ordinances at all, nor the assistance of .one day in seven to kindle spiritual feelings, seeing he is, as it were, all his life in heaven already.

And, doubtless, such the Apostle Paul expected the Church of Christ to be. Anticipating the second Advent at once, not knowing the long centuries of slow progress that were to come, his heart would have sunk within him; could he have been told that at the end of eighteen centuries the Christian Church would be still observing days, and months, and times, and years, and, still more, needing them.

Needing them, I say. For the Sabbath was made for man. God made it for men in a certain spiritual state, because they needed it. The need, therefore, is deeply hidden in human nature. He who can dispense with it must be holy and spiritual indeed. And he who, still unholy and unspiritual, would yet dispense with it, is a man who would fain be wiser than his Maker. We, Christians as we are, still need the law, both in its restraints, and in its aids to our weakness.

No man, therefore, who knows himself, but will gladly and joyfully use the institution. No man who knows the need of his brethren will wantonly dese crate it, or recklessly hurt even their scruples respect ing its observance. And no such man can look with aught but grave and serious apprehensions on such an innovation upon English customs of life and thought, as the proposal to give public and official countenance to a scheme which will invite millions, I do not say to an irreligious, but certainly an unreligious use of the day of rest.

This, then, is the first modification of the broad view of a repealed Sabbath. Repealed though it be, there is such a thing as a religious observance of it. And, provided that those who are stricter than we in their views of its obligation observe it not from super stition, nor in abridgment of Christian liberty, nor from moroseness, we are bound, in Christian charity, to yield them all respect and honor. Let them act out their conscientious convictions. Let not him that observeth not despise him that observeth.

The second modification of the broad view is, that there is such a thing as a religious non-observance of· the Sabbath. I lay I lay a stress on the word religious, For St. Paul does not say that every non-observanco of the Sabbath is religious: but that he who, not ob serving it, observeth it not to the Lord, is, because acting on conscientious conviction, as acceptable as. the others, who in obedience to what they believe to be His will observe it.

He pays his non-observance to the Lord, who, feeling that Christ has made him free, striving to live all his days in the Spirit, and knowing that that which is

displeasing to God is not work nor recreation, but selfishness and worldliness, refuses to be bound by a Jewish ordinance which forbade labor and recreation only with a typical intent.

But he who, not trying to serve God on any day, gives Sunday to toil or pleasure, certainly observes not the day; but his non-observance is not rendered to the Lord. He may be free from superstition; but it is not Christ who has made him free. Nor is he one of whom St. Paul would have said that his liberty on the Sabbath is as acceptable as his brother's conscientious scrupulosity.

Here, then, we are at issue with the popular defence of public recreations on the Sabbath-day: not so much with respect to the practice, as with respect to the grounds on which the practice is approved. They claim liberty; but it is not Christian liberty. Like St. Paul, they demand a license for non-observ ance; only, it is not "non-observance to the Lord." For, distinguish well. The abolition of Judaism is not necessarily the establishment of Christianity; to do away with the Sabbath-day in order to substitute a nobler, truer, more continuous sabbath, even the sabbath of all time given up to God, is well. But to do away the special Rights of God to the Sabbath, in order merely to substitute the Rights of Pleasure, or the Rights of Mammon, or even the license of profli gacy and drunkenness, that, methinks, is not Paul's "Christian liberty."

The second point on which we join issue is the assumption that public places of recreation, which humanize, will therefore Christianize the people. It is taken for granted that architecture, sculpture, and

the wonders of Nature and Art which such buildings will contain, have a direct or indirect tendency to lead to true devotion.

Only in a very limited degree is there truth in this at all. Christianity will humanize; we are not so sure that humanizing will Christianize. Let us be clear upon this matter. Esthetics are not Religion. It is one thing to civilize and polish; it is another thing to Christianize. The Worship of the Beautiful is not the Worship of Holiness; nay, I know not whether the one may not have a tendency to disin cline from the other.

At least, such was the history of ancient Greece. Greece was the home of the Arts, the sacred ground on which the worship of the Beautiful was carried to its perfection. Let those who have read the history of her decline and fall, who have perused the debasing works of her later years, tell us. how music, painting, poetry, the arts, softened and debilitated and sen sualized the nation's heart. Let them tell us how, when Greece's last and greatest man was warning in vain against the foe at her gates, and demanding a manlier and a more heroic disposition to sacrifice, that most polished and humanized people, sunk in trade and sunk in pleasure, were squandering enormous sums upon their buildings and their esthetics, their processions and their people's palaces, till the flood came, and the liberties of Greece were trampled down forever beneath the feet of the Macedonian conqueror.

No! the change of a nation's heart is not to be effected by the infusion of a taste for artistic grace. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid

.which is Christ Jesus." Not Art, but the Cross of Christ. Simpler manners, purer lives, more self-denial, more earnest sympathy with the classes that lio below us, nothing short of that can lay the founda tions of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep and broad.

On the other hand, we dissent from the views of hose who would arrest such a project by petitions to the legislature on these grounds.

1. It is a return backwards to Judaism and Law. It may be quite true that, as we suspect, such nonobservance of the day is not to the Lord, but only a scheme of mere pecuniary speculation. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a religious non-observance of the day; and we dare not "judge another man's servant; to his own master he standeth or falleth." We dare not assert the perpetual obligation of the Sabbath, when an inspired apostle has declared it abrogated. We dare not refuse a public concession of that kind of recreation to the poor man which the rich have long not hesitated to take in their sumptuous mansions and pleasure-grounds, unrebuked by the ministers of Christ, who seem touched to the quick only when the desecration of the Sabbath is -loud and vulgar. We cannot substitute a statute law for a repealed law of God. We may think, and we do, that there is much which may lead to dangerous consequences in this innovation; but we dare not treat it as a crime.

The second ground on which we are opposed to the ultra-rigor of Sabbath observance, especially when it becomes coercive, is the danger of injuring the conscience. It is wisely taught by St. Paul that he