Thy name."

How often occurs the interjection throughout the law :

"I the Lord your God am holy." "Fear thy God." "He is worthy

"He is a

to be had in reverence of all them that come near Him." great God and a great King above all gods O come let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker He is greatly to be praised: He is to be feared above all Gods for all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Honour and majesty are before Him: strength and beauty are in His sanctuary. Give unto the Lord, O ye kindreds of the people, give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; fear before Him all the earth" (Psa. xcv.-xcvi. and other places).

The very pith of the third commandment is the spirit that moved David to exclaim "O that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men.' This is the spirit of the truth, apart from which the system of the truth is but a skeleton of dry bones. It led him to desire the manifestation of the glory of God with an ardour that he could only compare with the fierce thirst of the hart kept a long time from water. There is a great distance between this state of mind, and the state of mind that would take the name of the Lord in vain. The latter state of mind is the more common state of mind: and, therefore, it is a matter of command that we avoid the foolish habit of taking the name of the Lord in vain; and a matter of intimation that God will hold guilty the man who indulges in it. The existence of a command with this terrible adjunct is a help against the folly when we remember it, as to which, it is never to be forgotten that the mercy of the Lord is in store for "those who remember His commandments, to do them."

The fourth commandment pursues and strengthens the same great idea in setting apart one day in seven for the special contemplation of divine ideas: " honouring the Lord not doing thine own ways nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words" (Isa. lviii. 13). But this commandment involves a variety of considerations, which must be reserved for another chapter.

CHAPTER V.-THE SABBATH LAW.

HE fourth commandment ("Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy") is more remarkable in some respects than any of the others with which it is associated. It is more artificial, if we can apply such a term to any appointment of God. To worship God, to abstain from hurting man, are ideas that the unaided human mind might work out, and has worked out in a dim way from a contemplation of the constitution of things as they are; but to suspend all ordinary occupations once in seven days is foreign to all human impressions of what is expedient; to mere human thought, it seems such a waste of time. There is a self-evident stamp of divinity in such an arrangement. As a matter of fact, the Sabbath law has not occurred to any race or nation. It belongs to Israel alone. It was one of the characteristic ingredients in Zion's affliction that the adversaries "mocked at her Sabbaths (Lam. i. 7). The Sabbath observance, wherever found, is traceable to the Mosaic code. It is peculiarly and exclusively a Bible institution.

Experimentally, it is found to be a beneficial institution-this weekly recurrence of rest for man and beast. It seems adapted to a need of nature; it allows the machinery of life to work longer and more easily than if kept uninterruptedly at work. In this sense it is scarcely to be described as "artificial." Its tendency to recuperate the physical forces after the exhaustions of labour, and to give the mind an opportunity of rising into higher exercises than are possiblɔ in the ceaseless activities required in the provision of daily bread, have struck all thoughtful minds as a feature of excellence not to be exaggerated. More blessed is the British nation in its partial conformity to this law than her Continental neighbours, with whom the Sabbath is more a day of pleasure and public ceremonial. Blessed will the whole world be when the Sabbath becomes a universal institution of human life, under the law that will go forth from Mount Zion to willing and obedient nations (Is. lxvi. 23; ii. 3).

That it was ordained with a purpose over and above the mere comfort and physical well-being of man, is manifest from the divine comments to be found in the law and the prophets. These speak of the Sabbath as a sign " intended to keep God before the mind of Israel. Thus in Ex. xxxi. 15, 17, we read, "My Sabbaths ye shall keep; for it is a

sign between me and you, that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you. Ye shall keep the Sabbath, therefore, for it is holy unto you; every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death." Again, by Ezekiel, 800 years afterwards, God says, "I gave them also my Sabbaths And I said, Hallow my Sabbaths, and they shall be a sign between me and you, that ye may know that I am the Lord your God (Ezek. xx. 12, 20). From this it follows that the mere suspension of labour was not a complete keeping of the Sabbath. Acceptable keeping of the Sabbath involved the exercise of mental discernment in relation to God. It required the mind to be fixed on Him in a special manner, as expressed in the message by Isaiah, “If thou turn away thy foot from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable, and shalt honour Him, not doing thine own ways nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places on the earth (Is. lviii. 13). The reverse attitude is deprecated in those who said, Behold, what a weariness is it!" "When will the Sabbath be gone that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small and the shekel great and falsifying the balances by deceit. hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will of their works. Shall not the land tremble for this? &c. (Mal. i. 13; Amos viii. 5). Even the eunuchs were commended who "keep my Sabbaths and choose the things that please me and take hold of my covenant" (Is. lvi. 4). Nothing better could be conceived —nothing more suited to man's spiritual requirements-than this compulsory suspension of secular activity once in seven days, and this overt concentration of the mind, in a special manner, on the Creator who in all natural life is out of sight, and therefore liable to drop out of mind.

The Lord God never forget any

It was not at Sinai an entirely new feature of the will of God, though formally incorporated for the first time in a national constitution. In this respect it stood in the same position as the command to worship and the interdict against murder and theft, which were all features of the divine "way" among men before their promulgation from Sinai. The very form of its enactment shows it was not new: "Remember the Sabbath day." This implies that it had been previously recognised, which was the fact, though not quite in the stringent form required by the law. We find it taken into account before Israel had got so far as Sinai, namely, when the manna was given it was said to them that on the sixth day, they should gather double quantity, and on the seventh day none, because it was rest of the holy Sabbath unto the Lord" (Ex. xvi. 22-26). How came

"the

the Sabbath to be arranged for before the Sabbath law was given from Sinai? Evidently, because, like sacrifice, it had been an element in the divine system among men since the day that God at the beginning "rested from all his work which he had created and made; and blessed the seventh day and sanctified it," &c. (Gen. ii. 2, 3). To this historical origin, indeed, the very command on Sinai ascribes it: "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day and hallowed it."

Here our faith is rudely challenged by the science of the age, and it is not well that we ignore the challenge. The unanswered challenge of any kind of truth is liable to prove an unstopped leak in the ship through which the waters gradually encroach, however dry and comfortable things may seem on deck. The challenges can all be answered, provided you go deeply enough into them. The challenge in this case relates to the allegation that "in six days the Lord made heaven and earth," and that the stupendous work was done about 6,000 years ago. Science presses upon our attention the fact that the earth contains evidence of having existed many ages-six thousand years many times over; and that the geologically-indicated phases of its development from stage to stage point to millenniums of years for each stage rather than single days. The argument founded upon these facts is that a system of things cannot be divine which, like the Mosaic system, contradicts so flatly the manifest truth of nature.

There is cogency in the argument, and it must be met. If the facts were wholly as alleged, it would be impossible to meet it. But they are not so. The Bible does not tell us when the earth was brought into being. It tells us that it was made "in the beginning," but this is not fixing a date. It is only telling there was a beginning, which is self-evident, however far back it may be put. The "beginning" and the beginning of the six days are not identical. The six days' work was undoubtedly 6,000 years ago, and the six days' work included the making of the earth in the sense in which a country is made when established and developed, but it did not include the making of it in the sense of bringing it into existence for the first time. The evidence proves this. It shows the earth existent "without form and void, and darkness on the face of the deep" at the beginning of the work (Gen. i. 2). It is impossible to lay too much stress upon the casual glimpse which these words afford us of the pre-Adamite condition of the earth. It is but a sentence, and yet it is a whole revelation on the point. It is like a rent in the back-wall of the human era, through which we peer backwards into a long vista of

C

there

darkness, whose length cannot be measured; and if Science says were millions of years in it, we say, as believers in the Bible, “Very well, the Bible allows for it in its opening sentence."

The six days' work relates only to the process by which, from the earth point of view (for the story is written for the inhabitants of the earth), the earth was brought from the condition in which that work found it. For reasons not disclosed, the earth had been submerged in water, and enveloped in darkness, which is the state in which it is first introduced to view. It had evidently been a long time in that state-with which the geological indications agree. How long is not revealed, either by the Bible or science. The moment arrived when, to Divine Wisdom, it seemed meet and proper to break into this state of things, and bring the earth into a habitable state.

Though God did the work, the work was committed into the hands of the angels, "who excel in strength and do His commandments, hearkening to the voice of His word." This is proved by the inspired rendering of the Hebrew Elohim (the word for God in Gen. i.) into the Greek ayyɛλot, the word for angels in the New Testament. (Com. pare Psa. xcvii. 7 with Heb. i. 6); also by the consultation among the creative operators : "The man is become as one of us to know good and evil" (Gen. iii. 22). The fact also explains to us the otherwise unintelligible idea of "God (Elohim) resting and being refreshed" after the six days' work (Gen. ii. 1). It is a fact that does not clash with the One Creator's relation to the matter. Though angels were the operators, the eternal Yah was the power working through them and therefore the verb created is in the singular, though the noun Elohim is plural. The Eternal Spirit working by the angels is the key. thought in the case—the conception that meets all the requirements, and solves all the apparent difficulties. It is a conception constantly illustrated in the events of Israel's history, as in the appearance of the angel in the bush to Moses "The God of Abraham " (Ex. iii. 2, 6), and the description of God in Sinai as "the angel" (Acts vii. 38, 53), and the law as "the word spoken by angels" (Heb. ii. 2).

The six days' work began with the arrival of the angels upon the scene. The scene was one of total darkness-not clear darkness, but Egyptian darkness-darkness that might be felt--darkness caused by the prevalence of vapour impenetrable, which, as yet uncondensed atmosphere, had no power of segregating into cloud and aqueous deposit. It was the state described in Job xxxviii. 9, "I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness the swaddling band for it." "Let there be light," said the Creative Power, in its angelic instruments, and instantly the darkness was irradiated before a way

;