Question 62

his challenging a special propriety in it—“And so a sin, which for the outward act is small, may in regard to the inward of it be a great one. As that act of the man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day, a small thing in appearance, to get a few sticks to make a fire; but he doing it in contempt of Moses, so as to put Moses into a strait, since if for so small a thing he executed or inflicted any punishment, he would have been thought a cruel governor by all the people; but on the other side, if he should pass it by, he opened a way to have the Sabbath broken; so as it was done in high contempt of both God and Moses, and this God took notice of especially” (Goodwin).

“Let us not grudge at this requisition of God, that the seventh day be unoccupied, as if He made an invasion of our liberty, and grudged us the enjoyment of our time, or sought to dispossess us of a seventh part of our gains. The Sabbath was made for man, not for God. We are to benefit from it, not He. And the only part the Almighty hath in the matter is to interpose His authority against our doing ourselves any harm” (Edward Irving).

And besides, the Sabbath comes to ourselves clothed with the very noblest and most commanding traditions and associations, both national and domestic, that would of themselves be a royal law to us, though we had had none other. For such is the solicitude and submissiveness of the Christian conscience, and such is the congruity, propriety, and blessedness of the Lord’s day, that had the law of the day been published in no more ancient and authoritative document than our own confessional and catechetical symbols, these, with the subsequent experiences and testimonies of a Sabbath-keeping people as sanctions, would have been sufficient to have made the Sabbath day to us “a delight, the holy of the Lord, and honourable.”

his blessing the sabbath day. “If Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the smallest doubt that we should at this moment have been a poorer and less civilized people than we are” (Macaulay).

But no historian could attempt to tell the spiritual and saving blessings that have for millenniums descended on the Church through this venerable and holy institution. The soul of every believing and Sabbath-keeping man contains for him the best commentary on this clause.

“Bright shadows of true rest; some shoots of bliss;
Heaven once a week;
The next world’s gladness prepossessed in this;
A day to seek
Eternity in time; time’s bower;
The narrow way;
Transplanted paradise; God’s walking hour;
The cool o’ the day;
The creation’s jubilee; God’s parle with dust;
Heaven here; man on those hills of myrrh, of flowers;
Angels descending; the returns of trust;
A gleam of glory after six days’ showers.”—Vaughan, 1695.

Uses

1. If the Sabbath day is all this,—and the half of its authority, dignity, and blessedness hath not been told,—we may well say with the scholarly and devout Bengel: “Let us weigh well the caution to whosoever shall break the least part of this commandment, or shall teach men to break it; a caution which can never be too much recommended to critics, teachers, and sacred orators.”

2. Commit to memory Christopher Wordsworth’s hymn,

   “O day of rest and gladness!”

Note.—There is a matter of some little literary interest connected with the word Sabbath, rest, and another Hebrew word not unlike it in sound and spelling, Sabaoth, hosts. The word Sabaoth is transliterated and used correctly in Rom. ix. 29, and in Jas. v. 4, but it is used in a mistaken sense, as if it were a form of Sabbath, in Holinshed, Spencer, Bacon, Shakespeare, Johnson, and Scott. This error has been corrected in the later editions of most of these writers; but though Johnson’s dictionary fell into the common mistake in its first edition, and is put right in subsequent editions, yet Richardson fails to point out the distinction in collecting his examples. Such authorities as Sir George Grove and Aldis Wright look on this confusion as the result of the limited knowledge of Hebrew that obtained even among our classical writers, which led them to mistake Sabaoth for an archaic form of Sabbath. Dean Plumptre, on the other hand, stoutly defends Bacon, and Spencer, and Scott; and contends that in their case, at any rate, the error lay not with the writer but with the printer. Annandale thinks that Scott must have used Sabaoth for artistic reasons.