No act of duty, or of benevolence, or even of hospitality, was forbidden, nay, was not rather enjoined. But, to make the dividing-line distinct and easy to observe by even the thoughtless, everything was prohibited that partook of the nature or encroached upon the sphere of secular work. Thus, on the Sabbath day the Jews were not allowed to "kindle a fire”— that is, for cooking, lest it might run into servile work; but certainly fire for comfort was not prohibited. They were to " carry no burdens," lest it might verge upon traffic, but it could have been no violation of this provision for a housekeeper to regulate the affairs of the house, or for a sick man to carry his pallet from place to place. They were not "to go out of their place" on the Sabbath day, lest they might be led to travel for gain or business; but not even Pharisaic perversity could warp this into an absolute prohibition against going out of the house; and they compromised between the letter of the law and their proneness to a rigid interpretation of it, by fixing arbitrarily the limit for travel on the Sabbath at two thirds of an English mile, and counting this as the maximum for a proper “Sabbath day's journey." They were not to "think their own thoughts or find their own pleasures" on the Sabbath day—that is, there should be no planning or scheming on this day for the conduct of their business or for their amusements. But while all the customary business occupations were thus prohibited, the ordinary forms of domestic and social comfort were freely allowed if not enjoined. The intention of the day was wholly merciful and beneficent. The Sabbath was designed to

be a delight, not a grievous yoke; it invited to rest, to happiness, to grateful remembrance and worship of God. There is nothing in the history of the day, or in the earlier and normal observance of the day by the Israelites, that justifies us in thinking of their Sabbath as a day of undue or unwelcome restraint. It was not a day of fasting, a day on which man was to afflict his soul, a day of austerity and self-mortification. It was a feast, not a fast. Its rightful observance not only did not repress, but it encouraged and quickened the natural and innocent gladness and joy of the heart, the social enjoyments which make the home and the community an attraction, a gladness, and a safeguard. We know that hospitality was customary on that day. Not even the Pharisees ventured or desired to change this feature of the original Sabbath. Our Saviour is expressly said to have been entertained as a guest on a Sabbath day, in the house of one of the rulers of the Pharisees. And it is thought by many critics that the supper, or reception, given to Jesus and many other guests, at the home of Martha and Mary, "six days before the passover " (Friday), was on the Sabbath day. It was his last Sabbath day on earth, yet he spent it in social communion with his friends before his death.

Such was the free and joyous character that belonged to the Sabbath of old under the wise and lenient legislation of Moses. If his legislation in this regard was stern in any particular it was mercifully so in the interests of the congregation at large, lest some single one, or a few, by setting the law at defiance, might early bring it into contempt and defeat its gracious provisions. The sudden and exemplary severity in the case of

the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath was needful at the beginning, and did not need to be repeated.

But these gracious and merciful features of the patriarchal and Mosaic Sabbath, the zeal and the calculated misinterpretation of the Pharisees, devotees of a rigid formalism, quite distorted into a travesty of religion and into a superstition and a bondage for the souls and the activities of man. The outer fulfillment they exalted into the essence of the law, and lifted the formal observances above the spirit of the institution. Or rather they annihilated the spirit of the day; they left it but an empty form. They made the law of none effect by their traditions. Much of this traditionalism is remarkable for its ingenious perversity. The many illustrations of it given in the New Testament show to what frivolous results a conscience that is no conscience, but only a hypocritical acting of a part, can lead man. We give one or two of these instances.

An incident described in the twelfth chapter of Matthew first brought the Pharisees and Jesus face to face on this matter, and will show how diversely they looked upon the Sabbath. One Sabbath morning, probably in April, in the second year of his ministry, Jesus and his disciples were passing along the lane through the ripening fields of grain. The disciples, even if they had not yet caught their Master's notions with regard to the Sabbath day, were Galileans, and quite free from the minute scrupulousness of the Pharisees; and they began to pluck the heads of the barley and husk the grain, rubbing it in their hands, that they might eat and satisfy their hunger. Instantly the Pharisees, who were watching to find fault, began to charge the disciples with violation of the Sabbath in thus "working" on the holy day. But Jesus replied that the letter of the law must be interpreted by the spirit of the law, and that the circumstances of the hungry apostles justified their act. He reminded them that the history of the nation supplied numerous instances in which the rigorous prescriptions of the Levitic law had been, and still were, violated for necessity's sake, or for mercy's sake, and properly so. The law forbade that any one should eat the showbread but the priests; yet once, when famishing, David, who was not a priest, ate of the loaves with the high priest's connivance and was blameless. The law forbade any work on the Sabbath, yet the priests constantly "profane the Sabbath," if this be a profanation, "and are blameless." Their sufficient exculpation was that they were engaged in the necessary services of the temple. But here-the Saviour went on to say-here in the case of these disciples is something* greater than the temple; here are men, men suffering with hunger. If ye had but understood what God meant when he said, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice," ye would have known how much better men are than empty forms and rites, or even than the temple itself; how much the living spirit of the law is above the dead husk of the letter. And then he added the principle which decides in every case of doubt, which is a simple, safe, universal, perpetual solution of all scruples: "The Sabbath was made on account of man, and not man on account of the Sabbath." *The word in the best editions is neuter, rì.

The substance is always better than the form; if the two come into conflict, if the letter obstruct the spirit of the institution, both reason and mercy should incline us to the largest liberty. The Sabbath was made to promote man's interests; if the too rigid letter of the law contravenes these interests he who is the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath, and passes beyond the letter, that he may the better compass the intent of the law-man's greater and higher good.

Another illustration showing how widely Jesus departed from this overstrained Pharisaism was given on the following Sabbath at Capernaum. As he was teaching in the synagogue there was present a man having a withered hand. This man had probably been drawn to the synagogue in the hope of a cure, and was understood to be a candidate for the Saviour's mercy. The Pharisees stood watching whether he would heal him on the Sabbath day, that they might find occasion to arraign him for violation of the commandment and thus put him to death. They are represented in their eagerness as having challenged him to this "work," by asking him, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath days?" knowing very well, as their crafty question shows, what his answer would be. But Jesus perceived their malice and retorted the question on themselves with an unexpected addition: "Is it lawful on the Sabbath days to do gootl, or to do evil? to save life [as I am in the way of doing], or to kill [as you are at this moment planning to do with me]?" The thrust was too direct to be parried; a thunderbolt could not have smitten them more suddenly or a flash of lightning revealed the secrets of their hearts more clearly. No doubt every person in the synagogue saw it and enjoyed their confusion. They were caught on the horns of a dilemma. An answer to either alternative would have been their own self-condemnation; and they were silent. Their malice at the first, and their silence now, excited Jesus's anger; and with a look of rebuke and of grief over their hardness of heart, but vouchsafing them no word more, as men too stubborn for argument, he turned to the man and said to him, "Stretch forth thy hand." What! stretch out that palsied, withered hand! It was an impossible task; yet faith surmounted the impossible, and the work was done.

Did Jesus dishonor and do away with the Sabbath? No! He honored the Sabbath, the Sabbath as it was first established and purposed of God. But these absurd refinements upon the legislation of Moses, these oppressive perversions by the Pharisees, he met with just contempt and rebuke, and by his opposition to their traditions he attempted to reinstate this sacred day of rest in the place which it once had held, as the defense and comfort of man, not as their tyrant and fetter. He taught that man is greater and better worth than any institution. Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for (on account of) man. The Sabbath was made to help man, to alleviate his inevitable burdens, not to impose new and heavier and harder ones. The Pharisees reversed all this. They turned the blessing into an oppression. They bound heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and laid them on men's shoulders. It was the Sabbath of the Pharisees, and not the Sabbath of Moses, which Jesus

opposed. He said nothing and did nothing that Moses himself or any ancient Israelite could have interpreted into disrespect of the Sabbath or into a purpose to abrogate it. He always observed it himself, he taught his disciples to observe it, and by his words implied its perpetual validity. If we had nothing else, the simple fact that the Sabbath was perpetuated in the Christian Church-the day only of its celebration being changed— shows that Christ's influence must have been not only not adverse, but altogether favorable, to the Sabbath. He claimed to be Lord of the Sabbath; clearly not with a view to abolish it—for that would not be lordship-but to restore it, to interpret, and to regulate it.

And so the Sabbath, the Mosaic-Christian Sabbath, of which our American Sabbath is the best type, remains obligatory on the Church and the world. It stands on the same immovable foundation as all the other commandments in the decalogue. While the decalogue stands unrevoked let men rest from their work on Jehovah's Rest-day.

MORAL REFORMATORY MOVEMENTS IN OUR GREAT CITIES.

ONE of the great battles of western civilization is to be fought and won in the purification of the American city. Concerning the abundant opportunity for such reformatory work there can be no difference of judgment. Our great centers of population, in respect to their moral condition, have a close kinship to the metropolis of antiquity and to every contemporary city of the eastern world. Although they may not be as depraved in spirit or as vicious in practice as the cities of antiquity, where Christianity had not entered as a leavening force and whose ruin was among the doleful prophecies of the Scripture, yet the wickedness of the best of our American cities must be confessed. Although such beneficial influences as those of climate, social convictions, the responsibilities of universal citizenship, and the condemnation of the Christian Church upon unrighteousness are also predominant, yet the open exhibition of degradation and sin in its manifold forms is the sad spectacle everywhere seen in our corporate life. If through the presence of the Gospel the modern city was never better, through the presence of the evil it was never worse. Any one of the moral irregularities and crimes that mark the living of the American city would seem an adversary too formidable to overcome; while such combined and malign evils as slander, arson, extortion, theft, cruelty to childhood and animal life, drunkenness, gambling, carousal, lust, Sabbath desecration, anarchistic plottings, riotings, form a phalanx of vicious forces to which victory seems pledged in the very outset from sheer force of circumstances, and to battle with which calls for the heroism of story.

But the necessity of such reformatory movements as are projected and already initiated in various of our chief American cities will be likewise admitted. The importance of the city as a center of influence in arts, learning, legislation, morals, religion has passed into the most familiar of

truisms. And all that is conceded to the city in general, in this utterance, must be granted to the American metropolis. As to the past, the larger contribution of the rural life to the national progress is one of the lessons of the previous four centuries with which the historian is familiar. Even in so late a period as the continental days the gift of leaders from the American villages to the army and the national Congress was inestimable. The country, no less than the city, won the War of the Revolution and helped to lay the foundation-stones of the new republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were country-born; Washington went out from the reposeful quiet of Mount Vernon to his immortal work. But as to the present, the American city, with exceptions, has become the controlling factor in the national career. In 1890 it is estimated that more than eighteen millions of the people of the United States lived in cities having a population of over eight thousand. By the census of the same year sixteen cities of the republic counted a population of over two hundred thousand each; twelve more over one hundred thousand; and twenty-two more over fifty thousand each. Boston, long since departed from her puritanic principles; New York, with her cosmopolitan interests; Philadelphia, eminent in conservatism; Washington, as one of the greatest centers of the world's legislation; Chicago, ambitious for size and power; St. Louis and New Orleans, with their luxurious tastes and exuberant living; and San Francisco, as the autocrat of the western coast, hold the destinies of the American nation in their keeping. The philosophy of human living justifies this claim.

In the conviction that the great centers of population thus hold the primacy of influence certain promising movements in moral reformation are now developing in some of the chief cities of America or are in established progress. But because for the most part they have not passed the experimental stage the methods to be followed in their enforcement call for immediate and cautious consideration. Admitted the timeliness of the movement and the combined counsels of the wise, the most philanthropic, the best should be applied to the determination of these methods, whose settlement and application are pivotal points in the well-being of the nation.

I. On the choice of right leadership it is evident that no small portion of success must depend. To the rule that all great advances in politics, education, civilization, ethics, religion turn on the personality of some individual of appropriate abilities for command and seemingly raised up by Providence to do his special work, the case of the leader in city reformation cannot be an exception. All the prime qualities of command must inhere in him. In so crucial a battle as the friends of righteousness desire to wage with the powers of evil and in which the issues are of such incalculable moment, the interests of the cause must not be jeopardized by the employment of unworthy or unqualified directors. Nor is it difficult to catalogue the excellences that the great leader in municipal reform must possess. Negatively, he must not, as a bidder for applause, pose in a sensational attitude before the public gaze. The people, at the