but let them turn their backs on its hated light and go where its glimmerings do not reach, and every where they will witness the ignorance of the multitude, and the uncontrolled despotism of an idol priesthood. Idolatry has retreated before the hated light of holy time, and now lies in ambush, waiting to return whenever it shall be extinguished. The enemies of revelation and the Sabbath are in fact the pioneers of idolatry, with all its abominable superstitions and impurities.

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” The entire influence of the divine government depends on the rey. erence and love for God which prevail among his subjects. Wherever respect for God declines-wherever his name, attributes, word, and worship, are treated with irreverence and levity, there the obedience of the heart has no place, and atheism itself could scarcely be more licentious in its results. Profaneness is ever associated in some form, and more commonly in many forms, with immorality; so that universally, the more profaneness abounds, the more dissolute is the community in which it prevails. But, among what classes of the community does the profanation of the name of God most abound? Never among those, as a class, who are reverential and strict in their observance of the Sabbath, but among those, almost exclusively, who lightly esteem, and violate that holy day.

"Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long, in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." But what is the treatment of parents by their children, where no Sabbath preserves natural affection, corroborates parental by divine authority, invigorates conscience, and forms a public sentiment which renders filial ingratitude disreputable? In lands nominally christian, children who are farthest removed from the influence of the Sabbath, are most frequently irreligious, self-willed, heady, highminded, disobedient to parents, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful;" while often, by their abusive conduct, they destroy domestic peace, and by their vices and crimes bring themselves and the grey hairs of their parents with sorrow to the grave. In pagan lands, the insubordination of children to parents is notorious, and the affections and comforts of the family state, as they are enjoyed in christian lands, are scarcely known. It is a common event for children, when their parents have become old, and can be of no further use to them, to carry them forth as a nuisance, and lay them down under the canopy of heaven, by the river, or the way side, to die the lingering, intolerable death of starvation.

"Thou shall not kill." But where the Sabbath does not give pre VOL. III.

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sence and energy to the moral law, how cheap and insecure is the life of man! Duelling, as a general fact, prevails among SabbathBreakers. It is doubtful whether an individual can be found, of the multitude who have fought, who was accustomed to pay a strict regard to holy time. And where do those assaults most abound, which indicate the absence of principle, and the predominance of intemperance, and rage, and brutal force? Precisely where the Sabbath is least revered, and the tavern has supplanted the sanctuary of God. Where, with horrid frequency, and more horrid impunity, do those assassinations multiply, which hold life in jeopardy? It is where the Sabbath, if known at all, exists in name only, as a day of superstitious forms, and is, in fact, a holiday, more destructive to morals than the other six. In many such places, the work of assassination has become a profession. For a small sum, a desperado can be hired to take away life, and can find a sanctuary from justice in the church; and, for a small portion of his gain, can be absolved from guilt by the ghostly priesthood.

There is a city in our own land, in which a few years since, an appalling number of assassinations took place in six months, and every one of them with entire impunity. But there was no Sabbath there, which gave presence and influence to the government of God, or tone to public sentiment, or energy to the civil law. And whoever reads the account of assassinations and murders which are fast becoming a part of our weekly intelligence, and observes the geographical location of these deeds of blood, will perceive that they abound chiefly in the twilight of religious knowledge, and where the Sabbath sheds upon the population, but a faint and glimmering light. In most unevangelized nations, infanticide is common, and often prevails to such an extent that one half the children born are destroyed, and not unfrequently by the hand of her who bore them. In nearly all heathen nations have human sacrifices been offered, and in many are offered still; and in all the life of man, is set at nought with an inhumanity unparalleled, even in the worst parts of nominal Christendom. In India, every year, multitudes of widows burn on the funeral pile with their dead husbands. It is said, indeed, to be done voluntarily; but it is a compulsory choice-the disgrace and persecution for a refusal, being more dreadful than death. Rome, thousands were sometimes murdered in a month in the shows of the gladiators, merely for the public amusement. Sabbath had brought to their ears the divine prohibition, Thou shalt not kill. Until the light of the Sabbath arose on that dark empire, a vast proportion of the population were slaves, over whom the mas

ter held the power of life and death, and whom, in passion or caprice, he often killed and cast into fish ponds, to fatten the fish for his table.

Buchanan, in his Christian Researches, writes thus:

"Buddruck, May 30, 1806. We know that we are approaching Juggernaut, (and yet we are more than fifty miles from it,) by the human bones which we have seen for some days strewed by the way. Near the pilgrim's caravansera, there are more than a hundred sculls. The dogs, jackalls and vultures seem to live here on human prey.— The vultures exhibit a shocking tameness. This Buddruck is a horsid place. Wherever I turn my eyes, I meet death in some shape or other." "Juggernaut, June 14. I have seen Juggernaut. The scene at Buddruck, is but the vestibule. No record of ancient or modern history, can give an adequate idea of this valley of death. The idol of Juggernaut has been considered as the Moloch of the present age, and he is justly so named; for the sacrifices offered up to him by self devotement are not less criminal, perhaps not less numerous, than those recorded of the Moloch of Canaan. I beheld another distressing scene this morning. A poor woman lying dead, or nearly dead, and her two children by her, looking at the dogs and vultures which were near. The people passed without noticing the children. I asked them where was their home? They said, they had no home but where their mother was.' O, there is no pity at Juggernaut, no mercy, no tenderness of heart in Moloch's kingdom;" and he might have said because there is no Sabbath there.

When the Sabbath was abolished in France, the Mighty God, whose being they had denied, and whose worship they abolished, stood aloof, and gave them up; and a scene of proscription, and assassination, and desolation ensued, unparalleled in the annals of the civilized world. In the city of Paris, there were in 1803, eight hundred and seven suicides and murders. Among the criminals executed, there were seven fathers who had poisoned their children, ten husbands who had murdered their wives, six wives who had poisoned their husbands, and fifteen children who had destroyed their parents.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery." But in many nations lying. without the pale of Christendom, promiscuous eoncubinage has prevailed to the annihilation of domestic purity, and all the sweet charities of the family state. At the Sandwich Islands, licentiousness and disease were fast exterminating the wretched population, until the Sabbath and the glad tidings of the Gospel came to their aid.

The impurities of heathenism cannot be named-cannot be even conceived. Buchanan, who witnessed the walls and gates of the temple of Juggernaut covered with indecent emblems in massive and durable sculpture, and listened to the obscene stanzas which the priest said "are the delight of the god," behold the "lascivious gesture," and "indecent action," and heard from the multitude the sensual yell of delight, as they urged the car along, says, "I was appalled at the magnitude and horror of the spectacle, and felt a consciousness of doing wrong in witnessing it, and was about to withdraw; but a scene of a different kind was now to be presented. The characteristics of Moloch's worship are lust and blood. We have seen the former; now comes the blood. This, thought 1, is the worship of the Bramins of Hindostan, in its sublimest degree! What then shall we think of their private manners and their moral principles: for it is equally true of India, as of Europe, if you would know the state of the people, you must look at the state of the temple."

Why should we allude here to the temple of Venus, and the similar abominations which pertained to her worship; or to the chastity of nations, a part of whose religion consisted in the most shameless obscenities! There was no Sabbath there.

Thou shalt not steal." But it is notorious that the unevangelized population of the world, with little exception, is addicted to theft. By the laws of some of the ancient heathen nations, stealing was encouraged, if not expressly enjoined. And among modern heathens, as missionaries and other travellers have constantly witnessed, this vice almost universally prevails. And from what class of society in Christian nations, does the anti-social conspiracy of swindlers, thieves and robbers usually proceed? Beyond question, they are those whom in childhood, no parental instruction and example taught to remember the Sabbath day-the vagrants of our cities and Jand, to whom the returning Sabbath brought leisure and opportunity to perfect themselves, by practice, in all manner of wickedness. "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." But in Hindostan, Sir William Jones, who adorned alike religion, literature, and the bench, declares, that he "never knew a Hindoo, whose testimony under oath, could be fully relied on." "They will swear falsely," says Mr. Ward, in the most shocking manner, so that a judge never knows when he may safely believe a Hindoo witness.Some of the courts of justice are infested by a set of men, who, for a paltry sum, are willing to make oath to any fact, however false."

The facility with which forged papers and faise testimony car

be obtained in most Catholic countries, is well known to commercial men. And in our own land, as we recede from the sanctuary and the Sabbath to those classes of society, whose inclination or employment carry them beyond its illumination and blessed attraction, we shall find the sanctity of an oath to decline, and life and property, as protected by law, to be more and more insecure.

"Thou shalt not covel." "The Hindoos, "says Mr. Ward, "are excessively addicted to covetousness, especially in the great towns, where they have been corrupted by commerce." And where, except in Christian lands, do governments exist, which are not rapacious? The rapacity of the Turkish government has well nigh depopulated some of the fairest portions of the earth, once the most populous, where now no crime is more dangerous to life than that of being rich. And where will you look for confirmation of the inspired declaration, that the world lusteth to envy,' and for mobs and insurrections, laying rapacious hands on the property of the rich; but among those whom the Sabbath has not visited, and whose only restraint is the coercion of law? Men of wealth, who are hasting to be rich by Sabbath day earnings, should understand that their wealth is floating on a popular sea whose waves the laws cannot chain, when the Sabbath has ceased to legislate in the name of heaven-that a volcanoe is beneath them, whose explosion man cannot prevent or withstand, when the fear of the Lord has ceased, which is the beginning of wisdom. If our men of wealth desire the scenes of revolutionary France to be acted over, let them obliterate the Sabbath, and propagate infidelity, and from the vasty deep,' call up the demons of blood-and they will come.

Volumes of facts, under each of these particulars, might easily be accumulated. We have selected a few only as specimens, but enough to show, that the moral law, without the Sabbath, is as imbecile to restrain and bless mankind, as would be the constitution and statutes of our government, without an administration.

From the moral efficacy of the Sabbath, as illustrated by facts, we are authorized to infer the universality and perpetuity of its obligations. It is one of the ten commands, which epitomize the whole duty of man to God, and to his neighbor;-the practical expression, in worship and relative duties, of that love which is called the fulfilling of the law.' It was 'made' or instituted for man in the beginning. It might just as well be pretended that the world was not created, as that the Sabbath was not instituted till the time of Moses. And it is no more an appendage of Judaism, than is the worship of God, or the love of our neighbor. It is, in its nature, (the