14 THE SABBATH. 



enth day, and hallowed it." In Deuteronomy this rea- 

 son is suppressed and another is assigned. Israel being 

 a servant in Egypt, God, it is stated, brought them out 

 of it with a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm. 

 " Therefore the Lord thy God commandeth thee to keep 

 the Sabbath day." After repeating the Ten Command- 

 ments, and assigning the foregoing origin to the Sab- 

 bath, the writer in Deuteronomy proceeds thus: " These 

 words the Lord spake unto all your assembly in the 

 mount, out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud and the 

 thick darkness, with a loud voice; and he added no 

 more." But in Exodus God not only added more, but 

 something entirely different. This has been a difficulty 

 with commentators not formidable, if the Bible be 

 treated as any other ancient book, but extremely formi- 

 dable on the theory of plenary inspiration. I remember 

 in the days of my youth being shocked and perplexed by 

 an admission made by Bishop Watson in his celebrated 

 "Apology for the Bible," written in answer to Tom 

 Paine. " You have," says the bishop, " disclosed a few 

 weeds which good men would have covered up from 

 view." That there were " weeds " in the Bible, requir- 

 ing to be kept out of sight was to me, at that time, a new 

 revelation. I take little pleasure in dwelling upon the 

 errors and blemishes of a book rendered venerable to me 

 by intrinsic wisdom and imperishable associations. But 

 when that book is wrested to our detriment, when its 

 passages are invoked to justify the imposition of a yoke, 

 irksome because unnatural, we are driven in self-defence 

 to be critical. In self-defence, therefore, we plead these 

 two discordant accounts of the origin of the Sabbath, 

 one of which makes it a purely Jewish institution, while 

 the other, unless regarded as a mere myth and figure, 

 is in irreconcilable antagonism to the facts of geology. 

 With regard to the alleged " proofs " that Sunday 



