and blessed him: and God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob, thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name, and he called his name Israel."* Who would not suppose that the name of Israel was now given to Jacob for the first time? Yet several chapters before this, when Jacob had wrestled with the angel, (not at Beth-el, which was the former scene, but at Peniel,) we read, that “the angel said, What is thy name? and he said, Jacob and he said, thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel, for as a prince hast thou power with God, and with man, and hast prevailed.”+

Thus again, to add one example more, we are told in the Book of Judges, that a certain Jair, a Gileadite, a successor of Abimelech in the government of Israel,

* Genesis, xxxv. 10.
Judges, x. 4.

† Ibid. xxxii. 28.

"had thirty sons that rode on thirty asscolts, and they had thirty cities, which are called Havoth-Jair unto this day, which are in the land of Gilead." Who would

not conclude that the cities were then called by this name for the first time, and that this Jair was the person from whom they derived it? Yet we read in the Book of Numbers,* that another Jair, who lived nearly three hundred years earlier, "went and took the small towns of Gilead" (apparently these very same), "and called them Havoth-Jair." So that the name had been given nearly three centuries already. Why, then, should it be thought strange that the institution of the Sabbath should be mentioned as if for the first time in the 16th chapter of Exodus, and yet that it should have been in fact founded at the creation of the world, as the language of

* Numbers, xxxii. 41.

the 2nd chapter of Genesis,* taken in its obvious meaning, implies; and as St. Paul's argument in the 4th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews (I think) requires it to have been?-Nor is such a case without a parallel. "Moses gave unto you circumcision," says our Lord; yet there is added, "not because it is of Moses, but of the Fathers;" and the like may be said of the Sabbath; that Moses gave it, and yet that it was of the Fathers. And surely such observance of the Sabbath from the beginning is in accordance with many hints which are conveyed to us of some distinction or other belonging to that day from the beginning-as when Noah sends forth the dove three times successively at intervals of seven days; these and other hints of the same kind being, as ap† John, vii. 22.

* Genesis, ii. 3.

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pears to me, pregnant with meaning, and intended to be so, in a history of the rapid and desultory nature of that of Moses. Neither is there much difficulty in the passage of Ezekiel,* with which those, who maintain the Sabbath to have been for the first time enjoined in the wilderness, support themselves. Wherefore," says that Prophet, "I caused them to go forth out of the land of Egypt, and brought them into the wilderness-and I gave them my statutes, and showed them my judgments, which if a man do, he shall even live in them-moreover also I gave them my Sabbaths." Here, then, it is alleged, Ezekiel affirms, or seems to affirm, that the Almighty gave the Israelites his Sabbaths when he was leading them out of Egypt, and that He had not given them till then.

* Ezekiel, xx. 10, 11, 12.

Yet His statutes and judgments are also spoken of as given at the same time, whereas very many of those had surely been given long before. It would be very untrue to assert, that, until the Israelites were led forth from Egypt, no statutes or judgments of the same kind had been ever given it was in the wilderness that the law respecting clean and unclean beasts was promulgated, yet that law had certainly been published long before;* and the same may be said of many others, which I will not enumerate here, because I shall have occasion to do it by and by. My argument, then, is briefly this:-that as Ezekiel speaks of statutes and judgments given to the Israelites in the wilderness, some of which were certainly old statutes and judgments repeated and enforced, so * Genesis, vii. 2.