The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1894-10-27
LESSON SERIES FOR 1894.
FOURTH QUARTER.
LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF OUR LORD
November 4, 1894.
INTRODUCTION.
MARK 2 : 23-z8.

LIN nv OALOANs
Beneficent to man is Sunday, the
Christian TRANSPORTATION of the Hebrew
Sabbath. 1t is, in a Christian community,
the rescue from greed and the clod of one
seventh of the time allotted to human life.
Six days of the week we yield to the world.
Six days of the week the time is not our
own. Greed and the clod have a strong
grip on every secular day. But when,
in Christian land, Sunday dawns upon
US, we for one day belong to ourselves.
Within the bounds of the common welfare,
every one may devote the day as he will.
The machinery of the factory is stopped;
its demand upon the operative is suspend
ed. The avenues of general trade are
closed the merchant is compelled to turn
his key upon his wares, and his claim upon
his salaried clerk is nullided. Every man
in Christendom, where the spirit of Christ
prevails, is by benefcent Sunday, made
lord of the day. Within large bounds, the
day is given to man, for him to use or
abuse as he will.-We marvel that
even religion should be able to wrest this
day from greed and the clod. We are
sure that no other power in the earth could
do it. There was, as scholars report from
the monuments, in ancient Nineveh, long
before Moses, an attempt to give the sew
enth day to bodily rest. No large success
is, by the historians, predicated of this
early attempt. We have no evidence that
the patriarchs knew such a day as the
Sabbath. 1t was unknown during the
bondage of the Israelites in Egypt. But
Moses, in constructing a government for
Israel, established the Sabbath by law.
1t was wise, brave, marvellous under
taking. We marvel that Moses chose one
day in seven, the precise allotment which,
as experience has testified, best accords
with the nature of man and the astronomic
year. The failure of the endeavor of the
French in the Revolution to make the
tenth day secular Sabbath, gave testi-
mony to the wondrous wisdom which in
the early ages devoted to rest precisely the
seventh day. Moses UNDERSTOOD what
some scholars in modern times overlook,
that the day could be wrested from the
World-Spirit only by the most stringent
laws C'llOlSCQ ny oCfCiCot PCndlllCos w III
knows that less than the threat of death
in the ancient time could have stopped
the accustomed work on the seventh day?
Moses was wisest of all in making the
Sabbath a religious festival. We may,
under the light of science, question the
Mosaic theory that God made the heavens
and the earth in definitely six days or
periods, and then rested on the seventh
day or period. But that the circle of seven
is the best division of time, that its har-
mony with the nature of things proves it
10 be in a real sense of Divine origin, can
scarcely be intelligently denied. The Sab
bath was established by the only power
sufficient to establish ii, = the religion
which devoted it to Jehovah. If religion
had not first wrested the Sabbath from
Mammon, we should in this age have
had no Sunday.-''TwO ineStima-
BILE advantages" says Ralph Waldo
Emerson, "has Christianity given to us;
first, the Sabbath, the jubilee of the
whole world whose light dawns welcome
alike into the closet of the philosopher, in
to the garnet of toll, and into prison-cellS,
and everywhere suggests, even to the vile,
the dignity of spiritual being; and
secondly, the institution of preaching
the speech of man to men,-essentially the
most flexible of all organs, of all forms"
And these two institutions public
services of religion, and the weekly day of
emancipation,-must stand or fall together.
Religion, not pleasure, gave to us benef-
cent Sunday. Religion, not pleasure, can
preserve it from the grip of greed and the
clod.