MAKING THE SABBATH A HOLY DAY.
IN one of the religious weeklies we find the following, which is part of a comment on the fourth commandment:— "On the seventh day our bodies and minds must rest; and our souls also. Our spiritual nature must hold communion with Heaven, thus making the Sabbath a holy day." The thought here expressed is altogether too common. It is a grave mistake to suppose that we have anything to do with the degree of holiness of the Sabbath-day. No man can make a day holy, no matter how holy or how absorbed in spiritual contemplation he may be. If all the Christian people in the world should agree to set apart Wednesday for rest and religious meditation and worship, that day would not be any more sacred than it is now. The seventh day is a holy day because God made it holy; he "hallowed it." He alone could do this. It matters not if every man in the world devote the day to secular work and pleasure, the day would be just as holy as it was when God hallowed it. But the people themselves would not be holy. This is the point: The action of people in regard to sacred things makes no difference with those things, but with the people themselves. By constantly reverencing holy things, men become holy; by disregarding holy things they injure themselves, but do not detract from the holiness of the sacred thing. Men cannot make God's name any the less sacred by blaspheming it; neither could they make the name of Baal holy by reverencing it. So men cannot make the seventh day any less holy by devoting it to secular uses; and all the "consensus of Christian thought" that there is in the world, cannot attach a single iota of sacredness to Sunday.