A

ND God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it He had rested from all his work which God created and made. Gen. ii. 3.

The infinite wisdom and goodness of the Creator are wonderfully displayed in all his works; but the divine love and fatherly care towards the human beings He had formed are most tenderly manifested in the appointment of this day of rest. The poet has rightly described it as the first, the best, and sweetest of all time.

It was made for man. The brute creation have no part in this rest, except as they are subjected to the will and service of men. It is the good gift of God to his human children. This privilege of one-seventh portion of time, free from the tasks of labor, what a boon it is to hard-working people! How they should bless God, who gave this day of rest!

And this law came to us from Eden, and through the testimony of the Bible: all that is good comes from God.

Like all His best blessings, it has a sanctifying influence on the enjoyments of the home-circle. It is a real domestic festival; on this, "the Lord's Day," when the six days of work are over, fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers have the full freedom of home, and its security of a day of rest.

It seems to me that women have never considered, sufficiently, the importance of this day to their own happiness, and to their opportunities of doing good. Moral culture gives to woman her highest intellectual dignity. She never applies her reason to mechanical pursuits. It is the world of human life she should move and model and perfect.

What opportunities these stated days of rest at home present to the wife and mother! The whole family are then brought under the sweet, persuasive feminine influence which, like the power of gravitation, works unseen but irresistibly over the hearts and consciences of men.

How to make the day of rest one of the best blessings of domestic life, I shall discuss in some of these Sunday numbers; now I have a few graphic pictures of its capabilities, from the pen of a distinguished clergyman (Rev. A. H. Vinton, D.D.), which illustrates the good influences it may have on the minds of men, and over the destinies of our Republic.

"In order to illustrate the influence of the Sabbath well kept, let us consider some of its influences of educating

the mind. Since we have adopted it as an axiom in our politics, that the prosperity of a free people is dependent upon their intelligence as well as their virtue, the question is invested with first-rate importance, How far the Sabbath is an educator of the intellect.

"Take, for example, that part of education which consists in supplying the mind with facts and suggestions which may be called the mind's furniture, the material of thought, such as comes from reading, and makes what Sir Francis Bacon calls a 'full man.'

"The Sabbath supplies this to the mind, because it is all found in the Bible, and the Sabbath is the Bible's peculiar day. Whatever of instruction, therefore, the Bible can furnish to the intellect of man is part and parcel of the worth of the Sabbath, or Sunday.

"How various that instruction is! There is history, which, so far as it goes, is more authentic than any other ancient records of the race. There are facts and phenomena of nature which are just as truly matters for scientific inquiry as any more recent.

"There is poetry, descriptive, suggestive, and lyrical, grander than Homer, more spiritual than Wordsworth, more tenderly touching than Tennyson; eloquence of every sort, from the grandly vehement to the meltingly pathetic; rhetoric that presents the most apt and striking combinations of human language, and in every form of composition, narrative, didatic, and dramatic.

"There are maxims of life and manners, pithy and sen

tentious, that cling like burrs to the memory, and are full of the seeds of things;' prudential rules of a wise life, furnishing every man with a truth just suited to every chance of his business or behavior. Such is this many-sided book, as a mere vehicle for instruction to the mind.

"No man can study its language, fresh from the wells of English undefiled, without finding his faculties stirred and refreshed, his understanding informed, his taste refined, his judgment improved, and his whole mental stature grown taller and fuller.

Suppose a man, who is destitute of the ordinary facilities of education, to devote the fifty-two Sabbaths of the year to the studious contemplation of these Sunday themes, and so for twenty years.

"Does any one doubt that the education of these more than a thousand days, almost as much as the four years of a collegiate life, would find this man far in advance of his associates in all the proofs and fruits of mental culture? Would he not be a first-rate citizen of a free government, with a riper intelligence than most men, fitter than most men to cast a ballot, if he were not, indeed, fitted to govern a commonwealth?

"A great advantage of this Sabbath education is that it is periodical; not so frequent as to make it a drudgery, and not so rare as to endanger the permanence of its impression. It is to every class of men, specially and peculiarly, a rest and a refreshing.

"To the industrial classes, whose vocations lie among material things, and to the commercial class, whose life is the arithmetic of earthly values and products, the Sunday gives opportunities and incitements to a fresh set of faculties, and opens the windows of their minds to let in the fresh air of thoughts from God and a better life.

"Even to the classes whose business is thought, the Sabbath is still a rest, while it is still an education.

"The lawyer escapes from the perplexities of conflicting precedents, contradictory judgments, and equivocal propensities, into the pure light of truth, and the glorious certainties of righteousness.

"The physician can separate himself a while from the painful study of second causes to familiarize his mind with the workings of the first cause. And the men of science and philosophy would lose nothing, but gain much, by taking God's existence as a standpoint of thought for a while; and God's government and providence as a controlling fact in nature, and the foundation of a system of final causes.

"Such Sabbath thoughts would be no less a rest to them than to the laborious classes. For, to those whose habit of life is thinking, the maxim of Sir William Jones is always true, that 'the change of study is recreation enough.'"