accordingly. If God will condescend to meet with you in your secret, as well as public, addresses to him, and has appointed you a set time for them, be not you so rude to him, and so unjust to yourselves, as to neglect them, or make but a short and slighting business of them.

4. The Lord's day was appointed for our furtherance and increase in holiness, and the carrying on of the work of sanctification in us; in the due performance of the work of the Lord's day, and the due observance of its rest. In order thereunto there is not only the pleasure of maintaining communion with God, but the real benefit of increasing our conformity to him. This profit we shall have if we pray to him and keep his ordinances; while thus we behold the glory of the Lord, we are through grace changed into the same image. By worshipping the Lord in the beauty of holiness we come to be partakers of his holiness, and so the beauty of the Lord our God is upon us. And is it not worth while to oblige ourselves to the strictest and most careful observance of the Lord's day, in prospect of those advantages by it?

The Sabbath day is a market day, a harvest day for the soul; it is an opportunity,-it is time fitted for the doing of that which cannot be done at all, or not so well done, at another time: now, if this day be suffered to run waste, and other business minded than that which is the proper work of the day, our souls cannot but be miserably impoverished and neglected, and the vineyards we are made keepers of cannot but be like the field of the slothful, and the vineyard of the man void of understanding. While you make no conscience of keeping the Sabbath day, and improving the precious minutes of it, no wonder that you are ignorant in the things of God, fools, or at least but babes in knowledge, for that is the time of getting understanding; no wonder that your lusts and corruptions are so strong as they are, and you so unable to resist Satan's temptations, your graces so weak, and you so unready to every good word and work; for when you should be furnishing yourselves with what is needful for the support of your spiritual

life, and the carrying on of your spiritual warfare, you are doing something else that is not only foreign and impertinent, but prejudicial and inconsistent.

Solomon has long since pronounced it, not only as the sentence of a wise king, but of a righteous God, that he who sleeps or plays in harvest is a “son that causeth shame,” and when he "begs in winter he shall have nothing." This is your character, and this, if you do not repent and amend your doings, will be your case. If at last you perish eternally, under the power of a vain and carnal mind, and go down to hell in impenitence and unbelief, your contempt and profanation of the Lord's day will greatly aggravate your condemnation; because your due improvement of that sacred day would have been a means to prevent your coming to that place of torment without a messenger sent to you from the dead.

Sirs, it is better to think of this now, when lost Sabbaths may be redeemed by an after care and diligence, than remember it in the bottomless pit, when the reflection upon it will but pour oil into the flames, and it will be too late to retrieve the precious hours that you are now so prodigal of. Oh what a cutting, what a killing remembrance will it be hereafter, to think, if I had spent that time on the Lord's day in reading and meditation, in prayer and praise, and the study of the Scriptures, and other religious exercises, public, private, and secret, which I spent in tippling, or sporting, or working at my calling, or in idle or unprofitable conversation, I might have got that knowledge and grace, and kept up that communion with God which would not only have prevented my misery in this land of darkness, but would have prepared me for the inheritance of the saints in light! If I had been as eager to get wisdom as I was to get wealth, and as solicitous and industrious to please God as I was to gratify my own sensual appetite, and to recommend myself to a vain world, I might have been eternally happy, and equal to the angels of light, who am now likely to be for ever miserable, a companion with devils, and a sharer with them in their endless pains and horrors

Then, oh then, thou wouldst give a thousand worlds if thou hadst them, for one of those days of the Son of man thou art now so prodigal of. But the impassable gulf between thee and that grace which is now offered thee will then be immovably fixed, the bridge of mercy will then be drawn, and the door of hope will be shut for ever. Sabbaths cannot then be recalled, nor will the offers of life be made thee any more; now God calls and thou wilt not hear, then thou shalt call and he will not hear. Thou art now called once a-week to rest; to rest from the world, and rest in God; but thou callest even this rest a weariness, and snuffest at it; justly, therefore, will he swear in his wrath that thou shalt never enter into that rest of which this is a type, and if thou be shut out from it thy condition will be for ever restless. Surely thy heart is desperately hardened if this consideration make no impression on thee.

5. The Lord's day was appointed to be an earnest and sign of our everlasting rest; the rest that remains for the people of God. It is intended to remind us of heaven, to fit us for heaven, and to give some comfortable pledges and foretastes of the joys and glories of that blessed state to all those who have their conversation in heaven, and their affections set upon things above. These are the days of heaven, and if heaven be an everlasting Sabbath, surely Sabbaths are a heaven upon earth, in them the “tabernacle of God is with men."

And have you no value for eternal life, sirs, no concern about it? Is heaven nothing to you, or not worth the thinking of? Do you indeed despise the pleasant land, and prefer Egypt's garlic and onions before Canaan's milk and honey, and a mess of pottage before such a birthright and the privileges of it? Your profanation and contempt of the Lord's day plainly says that you do so, and according to your choice you shall have your lot, so shall your doom be."

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You say you hope to be saved; but what ground have you for those hopes while you plainly show that you

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neglect this great salvation, by your neglect to commemorate Christ's resurrection, by which it was wrought out, and your neglect to improve the means of grace by which you are prepared for it? If you had indeed any good hope of eternal life you would not think much to spend one day in seven in the joyful contemplation of it, and in getting yourselves ready for it.

You say you hope to go to heaven; but what pleasure can you take in the expectations of an everlasting Sabbath, and of the employments and enjoyments of that world, when you are so soon weary of these short Sabbaths which are types of that, and are ready to say, "When will they be gone?" What pleasure can it be to you to be for ever with the Lord, to whom it is a pain and a penance to be an hour or two with him now? What happiness will it be to you to dwell in his house, and to be still praising him in heaven, who, by your good-will, would be never praising him on earth, but grudge the few minutes that are so employed? Heaven will not be heaven to a Sabbath-breaker, for there is no idle company, no vain sports, no foolish mirth or unprofitable chat there; and these are his delights now, which he prefers before that communion with God, which is both the work and bliss of that world. All who shall go to heaven hereafter begin their heaven now; as in other things, so, particularly, in their cheerful conscientious observance of the Lord's day.

And now lay all this together, and then tell me if there be not a great deal of reason why you should keep holy the Sabbath day, "call it a delight, holy of the Lord," and therefore truly honourable, and why you should therefore honour and sanctify him on that day; not doing your own ways but his; not finding your own pleasure, but aiming to please God; not speaking your own words as on other days, but speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God, Isa. lviii. 13.

Can the entanglements of custom, company, carnal pleasure, or worldly profit, be more powerful with you than all Can the pleasing of a custhose sacred cords and bonds ?

tomer, the obliging of a friend, much less the gratifying of a base lust, balance the displeasing of God, the dishonouring of Christ, and the wronging of your own souls? I beseech you to consider it seriously, and be wise for yourselves.

After these considerations which I have urged surely I need not insist upon any other. I am confident the reigning love of God in your hearts, and a deep and serious concern about your precious souls and their eternal welfare, will furnish you with considerations sufficient to oblige you to as much strictness and care in the sanctification of the Lord's day as the word of God requires, and as is necessary to answer the intentions of the institution and more than this we do not insist on. Think much of that of the Pharisees, which though blasphemously misapplied to the Saviour, was grounded upon a great truth; "This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the Sabbath day,” John ix. 16.

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Will it be to any purpose to suggest this further consideration to you; That the way to prosper in your affairs all the week, and to have the blessing of God upon you in them, is to make conscience of the Lord's day? That truly great and good man, the Lord Chief Justice Hale, writes very solemnly to his children; I have found by a strict and diligent observation, that a due observance of the duties of the Lord's day hath ever had joined to it a blessing upon the rest of my time, and the week that hath been so begun hath been blessed and prosperous to me; and on the other side, when I have been negligent of the duties of this day, the rest of the week hath been unsuccessful and unhappy to my own secular employments the week following. This I write," saith he, "not lightly or inconsiderately, but upon long and sound observation and experience."1

Shall I remind you how much it will be for your credit with all wise and good people? Those who honour God he will honour. Shall I tell you with what comfort you may lie down at night in the close of a Sabbath, after you have carefully done the work of the day in its day? Yea, thou 1 Lord Hale's Contemplations, vol. i. p. 323.