ANTIQUITY OF THE SABBATH.
By Baptist Weekly
The Sabbath was instituted at creation. In Genesis 2 : 1-3, we read: "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." Now, the antiquity of the institution depends on the space of time covered by this word "remember." It would lead us to infer at the least that the Israelites were acquainted with the Sabbath in Egypt; if acquainted with it there, it is but a fair inference that the knowledge of it was brought into Egypt by Jacob's family, and so backward to the time stated in the Mosaic record, where we find that "God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it." He set it apart as a memorial of his cessation from the creative work. Here, then, we reach a principle: memorials were always instituted or set up synchronically with the events they are intended to commemorate. The precious possessions of the ark (memorials) were not laid up there a thousand years after the miraculous events they were intended to commemorate. The stones set up in Jordan to memorialize the passage of the Israelites, were not erected a110thousand years after the passage. The memorial is always coeval with the event which it symbolizes, and on this principle, therefore, the Sabbath must be as old as creation.—Baptist Weekly.