In a "Prize Essay on the Sabbath," written by a journeyman printer in Scotland—which for singular power of language and beauty of expression has never been surpassed—there occurs the following passage. Read it, and then reflect for awhile what a dreary and desolate page would this life present if the Sabbath were blotted out of our calculations:
"Yokefellow! think how the abstractions of the Sabbath would hopelessly enslave the working classes, with whom we are identified. Think of labor thus going on in one monotonous and continuous and eternal cycle—limbs forever on the rack, the fingers forever playing, and eyeballs forever straining, the brow forever sweating, the feet forever plodding, the brain forever throbbing, the shoulders forever drooping, the loins forever aching, and the restless mind forever scheming.
"Think of the beauty it would efface; of the merry heartedness it would extinguish; of the giant strength it would tame; of the resources of nature that it would exhaust; of the aspirations it would crush; of the sickness it would breed; of the projects it would wreck; of the lives it would immolate; and of the cheerless graves that it would prematurely dig! See them, toiling and moiling, sweating and fretting, grinding and hewing, spinning and weaving, strewing and gathering, mowing and reaping, razing and building, digging and planting, unloading and storing, striving and struggling—in the garden and in the field, in the granary and in the barn, in the factory and in the mill, in the warehouse and in the shop, on the mountain and in the ditch, on the roadside and in the wood, in the city and in the country, on the sea and on the shore, on the earth, in the days of brightness and of gloom. What a sad picture would the world present if we had no Sabbath."—Ad. Herald.