260 ABROGATION OP THE SABBATH. 



A divine law— " real— or sujijwsed /" A holy life required,— not a holy day. 



graph, tlirows even my frieiid's former å priori argument com- 

 pletely in the shade. Behold the last retreat of Sabbatarian 

 desperation ! An absolute Theocracy alone " will satisfy free- 

 born Americans V for, since J. N. B. considers all the argu- 

 ments addressed to their reason or their sense of a common in- 

 terest, in favor of a sacred day of rest, avowedly weak and fal- 

 lacious ("a weekly Sabbath being not of itself obvious")? the 

 institution can have nothing whatever to sustain it but a posi- 

 tive and arbitrary enactment. If there is any force or meaning 

 in the above paragraph, it conducts us to this : though the 

 New Testament should not enjoin or encourage a ^^ Christian 

 Sabbath/' we must " shun to declare all its counsel;" for no- 

 thing will answer to bind the conscience here '^ short of Divine 

 authority — real or supposed !" An intimation certainly 

 much more creditable to my friend's candor than to his cau- 

 tion ; and I will add, much more illustrative of his zeal than 

 of his orthodoxy. That the conscience must be bound '^in re- 

 spect of an holy day/' he assumes as being too clear for proof. 

 3fj/ great object is to satisfy the enlightened conscience that 

 it should not be held in subjcction to the "observance of days '/' 

 and to show, by the uniform and consistent tenor of all Scrip- 

 ture, that " the Lord of the Sabbath" never ordained a holy 

 (Jai/, but ever required a holy life ! that, under the perfect law 

 of Christian liberty, every day is alike "the Lord's day:" 

 and none are " common or unclean." The hour cometh, when 

 neither in the mountain, nor yet in your Jerusalem temple 

 shall the Father be worshipped : but when ''the true worship- 

 pers shall worship Him in spirit and in truth : for the Father 

 seeketh such to worship him."* And my unremitting and 

 unmisgiving labor shall be (to the utmost of my ability) to 



* " The time oiice hatli been, wlien the Sabbath was not holy day. 

 And the time shall come, when to all true and Godly men, evcry day 

 shall he like holy.'''' Euasmus. [Paraphrase in Ifark ii.) 



"Tocontend," says Milton, "thatwhat under the new dispensa- 

 tion ought to be our daily employment, has been cnjoined as the busi- 

 ness of the Sabbath exclu?ively, is to disparage the gospel worship. 



