OUR HEROES. Heroes are not for battle-fields alone, Inspired by martial music, willing feet Bear tidings of great joy to souls they greet Grand Tolstoi toils on with his peasants. When A Damien gives bis life to recompense A leper's curse. Pity the scoffer, thou That sees not God shine in these hearts of men. EMMA PLAYTER SEABURY. VOL. XI.-NO. 64. 20 God spake all these words: "Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work." Christ spake all these words: "Keep the Commandments." "Not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law till all be fulfilled." "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." I. A man lives but once; why should he live like a drone, a slave or a dunce? A man who does not labor six days in the week is a drone. a slave. A man who cannot rest one day in seven is And a man who is both a drone and a slave in this age of enlightenment is a dunce. (Applause.) It was a famous watch-word of Charles Sumner, "If we would fortify, we must sanctify, the Republic, making it at once citadel and temple." Mirabeau said in the darkest days of the French Revolution, "France needs God as well as liberty." Benjamin Franklin, your Boston boy, took his grandson once to the aged Voltaire for a benediction; and the infidel, lifting up his hand over the head of the child, uttered simply these words: "God and Liberty." It may be a question whether the Fourth Commandment has in it statutory obligation for Christians; but the week seems to be nearly as old as the family in human history. The Sabbath is older than the Decalogue. We have a record of a day of rest occurring once a week in the old Accadian civilization. The memory of it is preserved on tablets that you can handle to-day in the British Museum, of a date many hundreds of years before Abraham. The certainty is, that the Fourth Commandment summarized principles that were of great authority, directly or indirectly, before the time of its proclamation. It is a certainty, also, that the Fourth Commandment is echoed by Christian practice as to the Lord's Day. Simply because of the ages through which this commandment has been honored, we ought to study it; for any institution that produces good results for so many thousands of years has on it the seal of the Divine approval. The ages are in some sense a self-revelation of God. Arthur Brooks, in a recent hearing before a Congressional Committee, said that he regarded the wisdom of the church in maintaining the Lord's Day and breathing into it the spirit of the Fourth Commandment to have been the result of inspiration as much as any book of the Bible. Perhaps that is going further than a cautious man should go, but the ages mean much, prolonged experience reveals God; and therefore I take it for granted that we ought to know what is in the Fourth Commandment. A friend of mine in London met a young French gentleman, highly educated, who was coming to this country, and told him that the difference between France and the United States is, that in France much infidelity prevails, and the people at large do not highly reverence the church; but that in America, in general, whether people are in the church or out of the church, they, on the whole, reverence the Decalogue. "And what is the Decalogue?" asked the young Frenchman. Although a man of liberal training he was in need of making that inquiry. And from some things that occurred in a hearing at Washington the other day I infer that we are in similar need occasionally, even on this side the sea. It was asserted there, for instance, that the Fourth Commandment contains nothing whatever but a requisition that men rest one day in seven. The Fourth Commandment is like the sun, far too dazzling to be contemplated without analysis. It is important to separate its light into seven colors. There are, in the Fourth Commandment, seven laws : 1. A law of Labor : Six days shalt thou" (that is, every human being, rich or poor, high or low) "labor and do all thy work." This is as much part of the Fourth Commandment as any other particular in it. 2. The law of Rest: "On the seventh day thou shalt not labor." 3. The law of Equality, or the rule of anti-caste, a most astonishing thing to come out of Asia: "Thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates." Whatever the origin of this law, that anti-caste rule in it is of astonishing practical value. That is as much a part of the commandment as any other detail you can find in it. 4. The law of Commemoration : For in six days God created the heavens and the earth." And in another place the commemoration of the escape from Egypt is one of the reasons given for observing the Sabbath. 5. The law of Divine Companionship: “In six days God created the heavens and the earth," and "It was God who brought you up out of the land of bondage." You are to rest because God rests. You are to commemorate your escape from Egypt, but you are to remember that it was God who led you out of the house of oppression. 6. The law of Worship: "Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy." A holy convocation held statedly for religious instruction and worship, was an institution older than the Decalogue and known even in patriarchal times. 7. The law of Periodicity: "The seventh day, thou shalt rest." Labor, rest, equality, commemoration, Divine companionship, worship, periodicity! Those seven laws are all visibly and palpably in the Fourth Commandment. And, for one, I profess amazement that a rude people in an age of the world as early as that in which the Decalogue came into existence, say what we will of the higher, lower or intermediate criticism, should have had rules of wisdom of this sort. Here some of the profoundest physical wants of men were provided for, some of the profoundest social wants, some of the profoundest political wants. If men have equal laws for rich and poor, for toil and for rest, they may possibly attain a sense of brotherhood. It is not wonderful that Republics have sprung out of such rules in the Decalogue. It is not wonderful that Republics rely upon such laws as these to maintain their most central, political principles. Here, too, the religious wants of man are met most explicitly. Worship is laid down as the duty of every being born in the image of the Most High. You may debate whether the Decalogue originated in this way or in that. You can have no doubt that it contains these laws, and that they are adapted to human nature. Wherever this medicine was mixed, it heals us, and it was mixed early. It is also an uncontroverted fact of history that all these seven laws of the Decalogue have been renewed and continued in the Christian Lord's Day. Here and now I am not asking how the Jewish Sabbath was transmuted into the Christian Lord's Day, but I beg you to notice as a fact beyond all controversy, that in the Christian Lord's Day, or Sunday, sometimes called the Christian Sabbath, we have the law of periodicity, that of worship, that of the Divine companionship, that of commemoration, that of equality, that of rest and that of labor. These seven things are all in it. They have all survived the turmoil of the ages. These seven rules dominate advanced nations, and are justified by their practical value to mankind, as well as by the faith of Christendom, that they have a Divine sanction. Omitting here and now all exegetical considerations, but regarding the prolonged and varied experience of the race as one of the self-revelations of God, I maintain that the coolest infidel, the man most given to crass discussion of Christianity, ought to stand in reverence of the antiquity, the utility, the demonstrated salutariness of the seven rules in the Fourth Commandment. (Applause.) A history of beneficence running through so many thousands of years is a sign of Providential approval of the Decalogue Week in its seven aspects. |