THE SABBATH. 31 



righteous will enjoy when this world has passed away, 

 " so these six days of creation are so many periods or 

 millenniums for which the world and the toils and 

 labours of our present state are destined to endure." * 

 The Mosaic account was thus reduced to a poetic myth 

 a view which afterwards found expression in the vast 

 reveries of Hugh Miller. But if this symbolic interpre- 

 tation, which is now generally accepted, be the true 

 one, what becomes of the Sabbath day? It is absolutely 

 without ecclesiastical meaning. The man who was exe- 

 cuted for gathering sticks on that day must therefore be 

 regarded as the victim of a rude legal rendering of- a 

 religious epic. 



There were many minor offshoots of discussion from 

 the great central controversy. Bishop Horsley had 

 defined a day " as consisting of one evening and one 

 morning, or, as the Hebrew words literally import, of 

 the decay of light and the return of it." But what 

 then, it was asked, becomes of the Sabbath in the 

 Arctic regions, where light takes six months to " decay," 

 and as long to " return " ? Differences of longitude, 

 moreover, render the observance of the Sabbath at the 

 same hours impossible. To some people such ques- 

 tions might appear trifling; to others they were of the 

 gravest import. Whether the Sabbath should stretch 

 from sunset to sunset, or from midnight to midnight, 

 was also a subject of discussion. " If it should begin at 

 midnight," says one writer, " what man of a thousand 

 can readily tell the certain time when it begins, that 

 so they may in a holy manner begin the Sabbath with 

 God? All men have not the midnight clocks and bells 

 to awaken them, nor can the crowing of cocks herein 

 give a certain sound. A poor Christian man had need 

 to be a good and watchful mathematician that holds 

 * Cox, vol. ii. p. 211, note. 



