SERMON XXII. The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. WHAT is affirmed of the Sabbath in these remarkable words is equally true of all the ordinances of external worship. The maxim therefore is general; and, at the same time that it establishes a distinction between the primary duties and the positive institutions of religion, it clearly defines the circumstance in which the difference consists. Of the positive institutions of religion, even of those of Divine appointment, whatever sanctity may be derived to them from the will of God, which is indeed the supreme rule and proper foundation of human duty,-whatever importance may belong to them as necessary means for the attainment of the noblest end, the improvement of man's moral character, and the consequent advancement of his happiness,-yet we have our Lord's authority to say, that the observance of them is not itself the end for which man was created. Man was not made for these. Of natural duties we affirm the contrary. The acquisition of that virtue which consists in the habitual love and practice of them, is the very final cause of man's existence. The intrinsic worth and seemliness of that virtue is so great, that it may be presumed to be the motive which determined the will of God to create beings with capacities for the attainment. These, therefore, are the things for which man was made. They were not made for him. They derive not their importance from a temporary subserviency to the interests of man in his present condition -to the happiness and preservation of the individual or of the kind. They are no part of an arbitrary discipline, contrived, after man was formed, for the trial and exercise of his obedience. Their worth is in the things themselves. In authority they are higher than law-in time, older than creation-in worth, more valuable than the universe. The positive precepts of religion, on the contrary, are of the nature of political institutions, which are good or bad in relation only to the interests of particular communities. These, therefore, were made for man. And although man hath no authority to give himself a general dispensation from any law which hath the sanction of his Maker's will, yet, since God hath given him faculties to distinguish between things for which he is made and things which are made for him, it is every man's duty, in the application of God's general laws to his own conduct on particular occasions, to attend to this distinction. If by an affected precision in the exercises of external devotion, while he disregards the great duties of morality, he thinks that he satisfies the end of his creation,-if he sets sacrifice in competition with mercy, as the Jews did, when, under the pretence of rich offerings to the temple, they defrauded their parents in their old age of the support which was their due-and when they took advantage of the rigour with which their law enjoined the observance of the Sabbath, to excuse themselves on that day from of fices of charity, while they could dispense with the institution for the preservation of their own property,-whoever, after these examples, thinks to commute for natural duties by an exact observance of positive institutions, deceives himself, and offers the highest indignity to God, in believing, or affecting to believe, that he will judge of the conduct of moral agents otherwise than according to the truth of things-that he will prefer the means to the end, the subordinate to the primary duties. On the other hand, the wilful neglect of the ordinances of religion, under a pretence of a general attention to the weightier matters of the law, argues either a criminal security or a profane indifference. No one, whatever pretensions he may make, can have a just sense of the importance and the difficulty of virtuous attainments, who in mere indolence desires to release himself from a discipline which may diminish the difficulty and insure the effect: nor is it consistent with just apprehensions of the divine wisdom to suppose that the means which God hath appointed in subservience to any end may be neglected with impunity. A neglect, therefore, of the ordinances of religion of divine appointment, is the sure symptom of a criminal indifference about those higher duties by which men pretend to atone for the omission. It is too often found to be the beginning of a licentious life, and for the most part ends in the highest excesses of profligacy and irreligion. Having thus taken occasion from the text to explain the comparative merit of natural duties and positive precepts, and having shown the necessity of a reverent attention to the latter, as to means appointed by God for the security of virtue in its more essential parts, I proceed to the inquiry which the text more immediately suggests, the sanctity of the Sabbath under the Christian dispensation. The libertinism of the times renders this inquiry important; and the spirit of refinement and disputation has rendered it in some degree obscure. I shall therefore divide it into its parts, and proceed by a slow and gradual disquisition. An opinion has been for some time gaining ground, that the observation of a Sabbath in the Christian church is a matter of mere consent and custom, to which we are no more obliged by virtue of any divine precept than to any other ceremony of the Mosaic law. I shall first, therefore, show you, that Christians actually stand obliged to the observation of a Sabbath,—that is, to the separation of some certain day for the public worship of God; and I shall reply to what may be alleged with some colour of reason on the other side of the question. I shall, in the next place, inquire how far the Christian, in the observation of his Sabbath, is held to the original injunction of keeping every seventh day; and which day of the seven is his proper Sabbath. When I have shown you that the obligation to the observance of every seventh day actually remains upon him, and that the first day of the week is his proper Sabbath, I shall, in the last place, inquire in what manner this Christian Sabbath should be kept. To the general question, What regard is due to the institution of a Sabbath under the Christian dispensation? the answer is plainly this,--Neither more nor less than was due to it in the patriarchal ages, before the Mosaic covenant took place. It is a gross mistake to consider the Sabbath as a mere festival of the Jewish church, deriving its whole sanctity from the Levitical law. The contrary appears, as well from the evidence of the fact which sacred history affords, as from the reason of the thing which the same history declares. The religious observation of the seventh day hath a place in the decalogue among the very first duties of natural religion. The reason assigned for the injunction is general, and hath no relation or regard to the particular circumstances of the Israelites, or to the particular relation in which they stood to God as his chosen people. The creation of the world was an event equally interesting to the whole human race; and the acknowledgement of God as our Creator is a duty, in all ages and in all countries, equally incumbent upon every individual of mankind. The terms in which the reason of the ordinance is assigned plainly describe it as an institution of an earlier age. "Therefore the Lord blessed the seventh, and set it apart." (That is the true import of the word "hallowed it.") These words, you will observe express a past time. It is not said, "Therefore the Lord now blesses the seventh day, and sets it apart;" but, "Therefore he did bless it, and set it apart in time past; and he now requires that you his chosen people should be observant of that ancient institution." And in farther confirmation of the fact, we find, by the sixteenth chapter of Exodus, that the Israelites were acquainted with the Sabbath, and had been accustomed to some observance of it be fore Moses received the tables of the law at Sinai. When the manna was first given for the nourishment of the army in the wilderness, the people were told, that on the sixth day they should collect the double of the daily portion. When the event was found to answer to the promise, Moses gave command, that the redundant portion should be prepared and laid by for the meal of the succeeding day; "For tomorrow," said he, " is the rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord on that day ye shall not find it in the field; for the Lord hath given you the Sabbath, therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days." He mentions the Sabbath as a divine ordinance, with which he evidently supposes the people were well acquainted; for he alleges the well-known sanctity of that day to account for the extraordinary quantity of manna which was found upon the ground on the day preceding it. But the appointment of the Sabbath, to which his words allude, must have been earlier than the appointment of it in the law, of which no part was yet given: for this first gathering of the manna, which is recorded in the sixteenth chapter of Exodus, was in the second month of the departure of the Israelites from Egypt; and at Sinai, where the law was given, they arrived not till the third. Indeed, the antiquity of the Sabbath was a thing so well understood among the Jews themselves, that some of their rabbin had the vanity to pretend that an exact adherence to the observation of this day, under the severities of the Egyptian servitude, was the merit by which their ancestors procured a miraculous deliverance. The deliverance of the Israelites from the Egyptian bondage was surely an act of God's free mercy, in which their own merit had no share: nor is it likely that their Egyptian lords left them much at liberty to sanctify the Sabbath, if they were inclined to do it. The tradition, therefore, is vain and groundless: but it clearly speaks the opinion of those among whom it passed, of the antiquity of the institution in question; which appears, indeed, upon better evidence, to have been coeval with the world itself. In the book of Genesis, the mention of this institution closes the history of the creation. |