12 THE SABBATH. 



respiration free. He cared little for forms and ceremo- 

 nies, which had ceased to be the raiment of man's 

 spiritual life. To that life he looked, and it he sought 

 to restore. It was remarked by Martin Luther that 

 Jesus broke the Sabbath deliberately, and even ostenta- 

 tiously, for a purpose. He walked in the fields; he 

 plucked, shelled, and ate the corn ; he treated the sick, 

 and his spirit may be detected in the alleged imposition 

 upon the restored cripple of the labour of carrying his 

 bed on the Sabbath day. He crowned his protest against 

 a sterile formalism by the enunciation of a principle 

 which applies to us to-day as much as to the world in 

 the time of Christ. ' The Sabbath was made for man, 

 and not man for the Sabbath.' No priestly power, he 

 virtually declares, shall henceforth interfere with man's 

 freedom to decide how the Sabbath is to be spent. 



Though the Jews, to their detriment, kept them- 

 selves as a nation intellectually isolated, the minds of 

 individuals were frequently coloured by Greek thought 

 and culture. The learned and celebrated Philo, who 

 was contemporary with Josephus, was thus influenced. 

 Philo expanded the uses of the seventh day by including 

 in its proper observance studies which might be called 

 secular. ' Moreover,' he says, ' the seventh day is also 

 an example from which you may learn the propriety of 

 studying philosophy. As on that day it is said God 

 beheld the works that He had made, so you also may 

 yourself contemplate the works of Nature.' Permission 

 to do this is exactly what the members of the Sunday 

 Society humbly claim. The Jew, Philo, would grant 

 them this permission, but our straiter Christians will 

 not. Where shall we find such samples of those works 

 of Nature which Philo commended to the Sunday con- 

 templation of his countrymen, as in the British Museum? 

 Within those walls we have, as it were, epochs disen- 



