Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/40

 all but total, silence of the New Testament and the early Church upon the Jewish Sabbath, together with the prompt change of the day, seem enough to settle this question for us Christians. But, in fact, this contentious modern Sabbath question is really in the main an outcome of the Puritanism of the last three or four centuries. And here, once more, the instincts of an order of clergy are apt to be against us; for naturally enough their tendency must be to regard the special day of their own ministrations as the best of the week. Inheriting that view, they must naturally be loth to disinherit themselves.

Bat the Sabbath is part of the Decalogue! Well, but the Decalogue itself is special, early Israelitish, and perfected only by the higher and wider law, recognized by Christ, of the love of God and the love of our neighbour. Its special character is shown by "the third and fourth generation" doctrine of the second commandment, which later Scripture of wider application has superseded; by the coercive fourth commandment itself; by the special allusions of the fifth; and, lastly, by the tenth, which, among covetable things, classes the wife with the slaves and chattels of her husband. In the same special category is the free polygamy and concubinage of those earlier Old Testament times; and the highest authority has similarly stamped the "eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth" doctrine. All this special case is still a high theological question, to which the best and perhaps the only answer has been given by Christ himself, on the occasion of yet one more characteristic instance of it, when he replied to the inquiring Jews, that "Moses, for your hardness of heart, suffered you