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LETTER,

&c.

Sir,

HAVING perused your pamphlet intitled "Horæ Sabbaticæ," soon after, its publication, I felt strongly inclined to reply to it; but my immediate attention was at that time engaged upon a subject which permitted no delay, and a serious illness subsequently prohibited me from every kind of occupation. I seize however the first moments of convalescence, to combat several of the opinions you have therein advanced, and to support, as far as I am able, some of those doctrines which you have denounced as vulgar and superstitious errors.

As in the preface to your treatise you deprecate a reply, and state the means you have taken to prevent it, I beg leave to offer a few reasons in justification of my interference. In the first place then, I have a public duty to perform, which I think demands such interference.

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(2.) I cannot allow to any man the faculty, which you have claimed, of knowing and determining all the arguments that can be brought against his own view of a question. (3.) If this faculty were granted him, it would by no means follow that he could satisfactorily refute them. (4.) It is possible that even old arguments may be so disposed as to throw new light upon a subject, and produce that conviction which they failed to produce under a different arrangement. (5.) I trust I shall be able, as I am sincerely disposed, to conduct this reply without affording you any reasonable cause for offence; especially as I am willing to give you full credit for your motives, and to make a fair distinction between your views, and those of many, who endeavour to attack religion itself through its forms and ordinances.

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I may now perhaps be permitted to say a few words respecting the method which I have sued in my answer. I at first intended to reply to your several arguments in detail; but I soon discarded that plan, for the purpose of maintaining an opposite opinion which might comprehend a refutation of all those objections which I thought intitled to notice: and I was led to this decision by discovering that in at least two thirds of your arguments we perfectly agree. To your opinions respecting the abolition of the Jewish ceremonial rites, and amongst them that of the Sabbath, 1

cordially assent. I admit, with yourself and Paley and Beausobre, that no mention is made of a Sabbath, before the sojourn of the Israelites in the wilderness. I grant that no passage is to be found in the New Testament directing the observance of a Sabbath; nay more, I allow that our Saviour himself, though no Sabbath-breaker", as you represent him, did, as Lord of the Sabbath, both by word and deed, give intimation to the Jews of its approaching abolition; and that St. Paul did exhort his converts to omit the observance of this and other ordinances, which Christ had, as it were, blotted out, nailing them to his cross.

Where then, you may say, lies the difference between us? To this I answer-chiefly in a definition, or in the signification of a term.

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I will venture to affirm, that wherever the

He particularly wished to make the Jews comprehend the proper distinction between the great moral duties, which are of eternal indispensable obligation, and the overstrained observance of ritual institutions. Jesus therefore took many occasions of performing deeds of mercy, and of exhibiting his miraculous powers, on the Sabbath, that he might shame and silence those hypocrites who carried the observance of its ordinances to excess, whilst they neglected the weightier matters of the law: but you can nowhere shew that he was not a strict though rational observer of this sacred institution, or that either his practice or precepts ever led his immediate followers into a contempt or neglect of its duties.

word Sabbath is used in Scripture, it either signifies that day of rest from every kind of labour, which was so strictly injoined upon the Israelites; or it has metaphorically an allusion to that rest. You on the contrary apply it also to the Christian ordinance of the Lord's Day, as well as to the primeval Institution given to our first parents, I mean in your arguments concerning that institution, although you deny its existence. Again, you argue upon the supposition that our Christian rite is derived from the Jewish Sabbath. I, on the contrary, derive it, not from that abolished ordinance, but from the original decree of God, which was given even before the promise of a Messiah, which was delivered upon general and moral grounds, which has never yet been abrogated, but extends to all ages and all nations, wherever the word of God is known.

Feeling the strength of this position, I will not even descend to what I nevertheless conceive to be very tenable ground, viz., the obligation upon all Christians to keep holy a seventh day, from its association with the other commandments in that code of moral laws, which was not abrogated, but rather confirmed by our Saviour".

a See Matt. v. 17. xix. 17, 18, &c.

Had you confined your discussion to the manner in which the Lord's Day ought to be observed, although I might have differed from you in opinion, I should not have felt myself called upon officially to enter into the lists of controversy. But since you endeavour to set aside the primæval sanctification of a seventh day, to propagate erroneous notions of the Sabbath, and to prove that our observance of Sunday, or the Lord's Day, is a mere human ordinance, unsanctioned by divine authority, I should be lamentably deficient in my duty, if I did not step forward in vindication of what I conceive to be the truth.

I now then proceed to shew, 1. That a seventh day was immediately after the creation sanctified by the Creator, or set apart to be kept holy in eternal remembrance of his having rested from his works. 2. That, after this ordinance had fallen into neglect through the corruption and ignorance of mankind, it was solemnly renewed in the moral law of the Israelites, and added to their ceremonial law, with strict observances and under severe penalties, to be a sign of their deliverance from Egyptian bondage, a covenant between them and their deliverer, and a type of that rest which should come from the Messiah, by whom their ceremonial law was to be abolished.