absorbed, and the amount of bad blood it has generated. Further reflection, however, reconciles us to the fact that waste in intellect may be as much an incident of growth as waste in nature.
When the various passages of the Pentateuch which relate to the observance of the Sabbath are brought together, as they are in the excellent work of Mr. Cox, and when we pass from them to the similarly collected utterances of the New Testament, we are immediately exhilarated by a freer atmosphere and a vaster sky. Christ found the religions of the world oppressed almost to suffocation by the load of formulas piled upon them by the priesthood. He removed the load, and rendered respiration free. He cared little for forms and ceremonies, which had ceased to be the raiment of man's spiritual life. To that life he looked, and it he sought to restore. It was remarked by Martin Luther that Jesus broke the Sabbath deliberately, and even ostentatiously, for a purpose. He walked in the fields; he plucked, shelled, and ate the corn; he treated the sick, and his spirit may be detected in the alleged imposition upon the restored cripple of the labor of carrying his bed on the Sabbath-day. He crowned his protest against a sterile formalism by the enunciation of a principle which applies to us to-day as much as to the world in the time of Christ: "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath."
Though the Jews, to their detriment, kept themselves as a nation intellectually isolated, the minds of individuals were frequently colored by Greek thought and culture. The learned and celebrated Philo, who was contemporary with Josephus, was thus influenced. Philo expanded the uses of the seventh day by including in its proper observance studies which might be called secular. "Moreover," he says, "the seventh day is also an example from which you may learn the propriety of studying philosophy. As on that day it is said God beheld the works that he had made, so you also may yourself contemplate the works of Nature." Permission to do this is exactly what the members of the Sunday Society humbly claim. The Jew, Philo, would grant them this permission, but our straiter Christians will not. Where shall we find such samples of those works of Nature which Philo commended to the Sunday contemplation of his countrymen as in the British Museum? Within those walls we have, as it were, epochs disentombed—ages of divine energy illustrated. But the efficient authorities—among whom I would include a short-sighted portion of the public resolutely close the doors, and exclude from the contemplation of these things the multitudes who have only Sunday to devote to them. Taking them on their own ground, we ask, are the authorities logical in doing so? Do they who thus stand between them and us really believe those treasures to be the work of God? Do they or do they not hold, with Paul, that "the eternal power and Godhead" may be clearly seen from "the things that are made"? If they do—and they dare not affirm
