slave-holders, while yet he prays that their destruction may turn away from us the more terrible judgments of God?

All this, be it noticed, is addressed to the people of color; and addressed to them by a man who has just been telling them (see p. 19,) that they are "entitled in fact to every inch of our southern and much of our western territory, having worn themselves out in its cultivation, and received nothing but wounds and bruises in return." What does all this mean-what is its tendency-why is it said to the people of color, if the author does not design (and we would fain hope he does not) to stimulate their minds into that fever which shall make them frantic with thirst for blood? What would be thought of that man, who on board a ship freighted with some rich cargo from the Indies, should address the sailors with thrilling and exasperating exhibitions of their wrongs, and should tell them-You are in fact entitled to this cargo, you have encountered peril and death for it while the supposed proprietor has been at ease in his bed, you wear yourselves out in bringing it from the ends of the world, and you get nothing but a coarse and scanty living, and abundance of blows, in return. And while our author pursues such a course as this pamphlet exhibits, kindling the minds of these people with irritation and flattery, with the lust of possession and the desire of recompense for wrong, with the memory of old grievances and the hope of speedy triumph; how can he reasonably complain if he finds himself feared and hated, not merely as one who is exposing error and crime, and laboring to effect by lawful and peaceful means a moral revolution, but rather as a wilful incendiary who would smile to see conflagration, rapine, and extermination, sweeping with tornado fury over half the land. We say not that he is such an one, but we say he ought not to think it strange that he is so regarded.

One serious thought, with which the perusal of this pamphlet has impressed us, we would distinctly urge on every reader. The sober and intelligent friends of the people of color ought to see under what influence these unfortunate fellow men are falling, and ought to be awake and active to reach their minds, if possible, with milder, purer, holier influences. And especially the sober and intelligent portion of the colored people ought to be awake to save their brethren from infatuation. The improvement of the people of color generally must advance with greater rapidity, must be more systematically and steadily pursued in the spirit of christian kindness and discretion; or as they acquire intelligence in other ways, their common mind will grow up in the habit of exasperation and hatred against those who ought to be their patrons and friends.

The means of improving the character and promoting the hap piness of the free people of color, are few and simple, and yet may be applied, as we conceive, with great effect. 1. To form them to habits of regular industry and thrift, let them be taught trades. This alone would remedy many of the evils in their condition. He who brings up a colored man as a domestic servant, when he might have made him a shoemaker, a carpenter, or a printer, commits a practical error of no slight consequence. 2. Give the young all the education which they need to place them on a level with the more intelligent white mechanics-a class of citizens, by the way, far surpassing in intelligence any class not professionally literary. 3. Religious instruction in churches and sabbath schools, is of obvious and indispensable importance. 4. Teach them habits of doing good to one another, and to any that are more wretched than themselves. Why should they not be roused to benevolent enterprise in behalf of the African continent? 5. Let no pains be spared to give them a taste for reading. A series of books not unlike Hannah More's cheap Repository, adapted to their wants, a magazine or weekly paper full of information designed expressly for them, might be eminently useful.

ART. VIII.-THE PERPETUITY OF THE LAW OF THE SABBATH, OR THE GENERAL SABBATH UNION DEFended.

The fourth commandment of the decalogue, Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy, is not the language of appointment or institution; but recognizes an existing obligation to keep the sabbath holy. It supposes the previous separation of the day to sacred purposes, and enjoins the due observance of it, as having been so separated. The sabbath, in fact, was made not for the Jews, nor for any age or nation, but for man, with whose existence it wants but a day of being coeval. Man was made on the sixth day; on the seventh, God having finished the heavens and the earth and all the host of them, rested from his glorious work, and therefore blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. We here find the period of the institution of the sabbath, and the law, which made its observance a part of the duty of man. God's blessing and hallowing the seventh day, was not his imparting any essential sanctity or blessing to the day itself, as if a portion of time were a conscious intelligence, but was his appointing it to be a day of peculiar utility to mankind, and so to be observed by them in a sacred manner. The day was sanctified and blessed, not on its own account but man's, for whose sake all days and the creation itself were subordinately designed: and God's resting on that

day did not import that the work of creation, however vast, had wearied the Almighty, but that having accomplished it, his mind reposed in what he had done with entire satisfaction, as a worthy though inadequate exhibition of his infinite perfection; the record of which fact, in the volume he has given us as our rule of practice, is at once a most powerful enforcement of the duty of keeping the sabbath, and a most illustrious example of the manner in which that duty should be performed.

II. What practical regard the sabbath received from mankind before the giving of the law of Moses, the brief history of those times does not inform us; but that it had been observed by the holy men of that period, may be gathered from several intimations; and that its observance was obligatory when the law was given, is clearly evident, as we have remarked already, from the language of the precept concerning it; which would not have commanded the Israelites to remember to keep the sabbath holy, if a sabbath had not until that moment been appointed.

III. And now, since the sabbath was no peculiarity of the Jews' religion, but was made for man almost as soon as inan himself was made, why should it be supposed that with the abolition of Judaism, the world was deprived of the earliest expression of its Maker's provident love? The passing away of the ritual of Moses, no more involved of necessity the abrogation of the sabbath, than the abrogation of marriage, or of prayer, or of any other holy service, not belonging peculiarly to that symbolical institute. If the new dispensation does not unequivocally disown a sabbath, the world has no more cause to think this divine ordinance disannulled, than that God has disannulled his covenant respecting the day and the night, or the seasons of the year.

IV. The importance of keeping the sabbath, not as pertaining to Judaism, but to essential and indispensable holiness, is manifest from the Jewish scriptures themselves. The fact that we find a precept enjoining the observance of the sabbath, among the ten commandments, those unchangeable laws of the moral kingdom, which though registered in the Mosaic code, were written on the heart of man when he was created, and were gloriously distinguished from the carnal ordinances designed for the Jews only, by being proclaimed out of the midst of fire, with God's own voice, and written on tables of stone with God's own finger, seems to intimate the keeping of the sabbath to be no part of a mere ceremonial service, which after a while was to cease and pass away, but a branch of that substantial holiness, the necessity for which remains the same through all the changes and circumstances of man's condition. This accords with the voice of the prophets, who while they speak of mere ceremonial observances as being in them

selves of no use, and as proving a snare if confided in, as was too commonly done, insist largely upon the keeping of the sabbath, as arbitrating the character and destiny of man. "If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable; and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." When or where has God so spoken in regard to any merely ceremonial service? The due observance of the sabbath, here has promise of the divine complacency in its highest degrees, and it is clearly implied, that this complacency will be withheld from the violators of the sabbath. Behold the grand importance of this appointment, and how they reproach it; who by making it vanish away with the ritual of Moses, place it on a level with that shadowy institute.

V. Nor do the scriptures of the old testament merely distinguish and set apart the sabbath, in this manner, from the peculiarities of the system of Moses; they also decisively witness to its outliving that system, and passing after its dissolution into the last and more glorious dispensation of the gospel. After God had said by the prophet Isaiah, lvi. 1. "My salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed," (as it was under the gospel,) he added, "blessed is the man that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it; and keepeth his hand from doing any evil." Why is the observance of the sabbath commanded in this connection, but to intimate its congeniality with the simple spirit of the evangelical economy? In the next verses, a place in God's house, and a name better than of sons and daughters, are promised to persons, who by the Jewish ritual were excluded from the congregation of the Lord,—a time of course is referred to, when that ritual would be superseded by the new dispensation; but the utmost stress is laid upon the observance of the sabbath, as at that time indispensable. For the persons spoken of were to be blessed as above mentioned, only as keeping God's sabbaths, and choosing the things that please him. The prophet proceeds in the following verses, to extend the fulness of the divine favor to "the sons of the strapger," the Gentiles indiscriminately, of whom it is written, "even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called a house of prayer for all people." Yet was it as "keeping the sabbath from polluting it," that this mercy was to be shewn to the Gentiles. The sabbath therefore is plainly declared in the old tes

tament, to be a perpetual ordinance, the observance of which would be required under the most solemn sanctions, of those who should live in the times of the gospel.

VI. It was agreeable to THE REASON OF THINGS, that such a difference should be made between the law of the sabbath, and the ritual institutions of the Jews. Those institutions being typical, mere shadows of good things to come, became unprofitable and unmeaning, when the antetypes, the good things themselves, appeared. It was expedient that they should come to an end; but not so the sabbath. What called for that appointment at first, calls as urgently still. A sabbath was never more proper in itself, and surely never more needed than now. Has it ceased to be desirable or right, that mankind should rest from labor, one day out of seven, that they may give themselves to holy meditations and services? Why has this observance become improper and unreasonable? And if still reasonable and proper, why should the divine law which first required it, have been annulled by the gospel.

VII. But the plea not of reasonableness only, but also of necessity, may be urged in favor of the continuance of the sabbath. Such high ground in this argument had perhaps been untenable, if man had not fallen. Though a sabbath, even in that case, would have been proper and useful, perhaps it would not have been indispensably necessary to mankind. Possibly they might have kept themselves in the fear and service of God without a sabbath. But could the fallen race have dispensed with one? far back into the past as our knowledge reaches, the sabbath is seen to be the grand instrument of whatever holiness has at any time existed amongst men. Need we say what has been the character of those portions of the human family which have had no sabbaths amongst them? Need we describe the moral state of the heathen nations, and what those nations have always been? What did France become when she abolished the sabbath? What would quickly befal this country, distinguished as it is by intelligence and virtue, if the sabbath should cease from among us? When would this earth become the habitation of righteousness, or be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the seas, if the observance of the sabbath should be henceforth discontinued? To alledge that christianity abrogated the sabbath, is to make christianity inimical to itself; to make it disarm itself of the only means by which it can prevail; to make it an unwise, preposterous, selfruining system; adverse to the fulfilment of prophecy, an enemy of all righteousness, the corrupter and destroyer of mankind. The direct aim of christianity is the world's complete reformation; its transformation into the likeness of heaven. With such an object in view it were natural to expect that it would remove out of VOL. IV.

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