SERM. vl.] THE LORD'S-DAY, OR CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 85 from his work of creation : The sabbath was given to man to put him in mind of the creation of the world by the true God in six days, and to, do honour to God the Creator. But all mankind in all ages, as well as Adam their Father, should preserve this truth in their remem- brance : and the continual return of a seventh dayof rest is an'everlasting memorial of it, and gives opportunities continually for .paying homage to that Almighty Being that made us. 3. " Consider the place which this command of the sabbath bears in the law of God, when it was renew- ed and enjoined to the nation of Israel: This Both in the opinion of most divines add considerable weight to this argument. It is one of the commands. of the moral law, that was pronounced by the mouth of God himself on Sinai, with much glory and terror : It stands amongst those laws in Exodus xx. 1 -17. which are con- ceived to be moral and perpetual, except in some. small limitations and accommodations to the Jewish state. Remember the sabbath-day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but the seventh is the sabbath of the Lord thy God, á.c." It. was written with the rest in the two tables of stone, which perhaps in that typical dispensation might denote perpetuity, and that it must last like a rock for ever. It was written by the finger of God himself, which gives a peculiar honour to it, and it was laid up in the ark of the covenant on which God dwelt in a bright cloud, or a blaze of glory behind the cloud; and thus it was put under God's own eye and care, together with these laws which are of per- petual obligation. It is granted indeed that in the books of Moses there are some peculiar rigors and ceremonies, and severe prohibitions of every earthly work under capital penal- ties added to the sabbath and enjoined to the Jews; bût these do not beldng to the sabbath considered in itself, but are properly the ceremonial and Jewish appendages -of it. 4. When the apostles by divine appointment had abolished all the Jewish sabbaths, and all those ceremo- nies and peculiar austerities which belonged to the ob- servation of the seventh day in the Jewish State; Gal. iv. 9--11. and Col. ii. 1G, 17. yet ." they still practised r= 3
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