holding their own some centuries, and thus gaining time to develope the spiritual life which lay under and among the piles of earth that covered them, the Jews, divided among themselves and surrounded by enemies, would most probably never have attained to the rank of a nation; they would have been lost among their more powerful neighbours, and all trace and memory of them would long since have perished from the earth.

(Ver. 28.) God's first words to man are words of blessing. He limits man's duties by his pleasures. Those pleasures, however, are purely temporal, and

1st. Animal. They are sexual, but sexual limited by the ends for which the sexes were created: "Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth.”

2nd. Of dominion. "Subdue the earth, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the face of the earth." Man bows to God, and the brute creation bows to man. Over all living things, man, by God's patent, is created the natural lord; but the earth is given him conditionally, he must subdue it; by his efforts and labour alone shall it become subject to his will.

(Ver. 29.) God, as if continuing His blessing, gives to man corn and fruit for food, and to the beast of the field He allots the green herb. No carnivorous animals then had been yet called into existence. Lions and tigers, whose teeth and jaws unfit them for pasturage, could not have been yet created; for, grant that Nature has been ever consistent with herself, to suppose them with other teeth and jaws is to suppose them, as comparative anatomy shows us, with other limbs and another confirmation of body, i.e. is to suppose them something else than lions and tigers.'

2 Yet in the reign of the Messiah, during which, as in the reign of Sosiosh of the Persian creed, earth will again become an Eden, and man probably return to his pristine food we are told by the prophet, "That the wolf shall dwell with the

lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid, and the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them; and the cow and the bear shall feed, and their young ones shall lie down together, and the

With man, however, the case is different. According to Cuvier, he seems to have been destined to feed principally on fruits, and the roots and succulent parts of vegetables; his hands enable him to gather or tear them up with facility, and his short and rather feeble jaws on the one side, and the shape of his canine and molinary teeth on the other, scarcely permit him to pasture on grass or to devour flesh until prepared by fire; but the instant that he becomes acquainted with fire and its uses, and that he has acquired the skill to seize, or at a distance to kill, other animals, then all living creatures serve for his nourishment, and enable him infinitely to multiply his species. Not improbable, therefore, is it that man's first food was, as Moses shows us, of fruit and vegetables. God, this sixth day, overlooks all His work, and, "behold it was very good."

Seventh day (ii. 1-3.) God rests from his labour and blesses the seventh-day and sanctifies it. "Sanctifies it"but how? The fourth commandment (Exodus xx.) refers exclusively to the Sabbath and the manner in which it should be observed. On this day, the Israelite must "not do any work, nor his son, nor his daughter, nor his manservant, nor his maid-servant, nor his cattle, nor the stranger within his gates;" and consequently, on this day, the people, while yet in the desert, are forbidden to collect manna, or to light fires, or to gather wood; and afterwards, in Jerusalem, on this day no victuals can be sold; through the city-gates no burden is permitted to pass, and about the walls no merchant of Tyre, no asses laden with wine, or grapes, or figs, are suffered to lodge: for "the Lord hath hallowed the Sabbath, to do no work therein."5

lion shall eat straw like the ox; and the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child put his hand on the cockatrice' den."-Isai. xi. 6-8. Vide some observations on this passage, opposed to the arguments I have used, in Nimrod, vol. iv, p. 150.

4

On this day, then, the business of life was at a stand. The day was hallowed by rest. Rest from labour was all that the law required from the Israelites, as a nation, on the Sabbath.

But are we then to conclude that the people of Israel celebrated "the world's birth-day"" by devoting it to mere rest from labour, to indolence, to a longer sleep? From 2 Kings iv. 23, we may gather, that it was customary on the Sabbath to visit some priest, prophet, or holy man, no doubt for instruction and exhortation in the duties of religion. And from the chap. xvi. v. 17, of the same book, it would seem as though "a covert," or hall, or cloister, had been built and set apart for those, who frequented the temple on that day. A portion of the Sabbath, then, was not improbably devoted, even in the early periods of Jewish history, as it certainly was in the later times of Christ, to religious observances; and the remainder was spent, by the better part of the community at least, "in a festal cheerfulness," in receiving and returning the visits

8

In the 58th chapter of Isaiah perhaps, the Sabbath is alluded to, as requiring something more than this. But Philo, quoted by Spenser (De Leg. Heb.), speaks of it as bringing rest even to tree and flower; and, in the Espion Turc, is a Jewish legend respecting it, quite in the Rabbinical taste: "Les Juifs parlent d'une rivière d'Orient, qui demeure immobile le septième jour de la semaine, ce qu'ils regardent comme une confirmation de leur loi. Ils disent aussi que ce jour-là, les satyres et autres monstres du désert évitent la lumière du soleil, et se cachent dans les cavernes de la terre, où ils maudissent le Sabbath parcequ'il surprit Dieu avant qu'il eut achévé à donner la dernière main à leur forme, &c.”—Vol. iii, p. 11. 7 Tηy τov коμov yevelλiov ýμepav. -Philo.

8 "Judæi veteres otium sabbati

cum, non solummodo pietatis officiis impenderunt. Eos enim die Sabbati (saltem postquam synagogæ vel templi sacris adfuissent) epulis, choreis, ludis, compotationibus et exercitiis juvenilibus seipsos oblectare solitos, multis veterum testimoniis, a Sherlogo et Heylano nostro congestis, abunde confirmatum est. Fatetur ipse

Philo: Mosen æquum censuisse, ut sabbatum celebrarent otio}; et ev iλapivais evovμiais, festis hilaritatibus. Augustinus asserens Judæos Sabbatum coluisse tantum ad luxuriam et ebrietatem, eosque quievisse solummodo ad nugas et luxurias suas, quod diem illum languido et luxurioso otio consumerent, eoque non solum deliciis Judaicis, sed ad nequitiam abuterentur."-Spenser, De Leg. Heb. lib. i, c. v, p. 79. Nevertheless an opinion obtained among the Romans, that the Jews fasted on their

of friends, in feasts, and dances, and games, and juvenile exercises; while by the more sensual it was wasted in idleness, and luxury, and drunkenness, in the commission of all those crimes to which idleness is the certain passport.

In reviewing this creation we are struck:

I. By its division into days.

These days, though several of them are undetermined by any revolution of the earth round the sun, were nevertheless, I presume, meant, and understood to be natural days of twenty-four hours each. Some commentators, however, have taken another view of them; and of late,1 Faber, anxious to reconcile Moses with the geologists, argues, that, as these days are homogenous; and as the term day, in Hebrew, is often used for any indefinite time, and cannot in this chapter mean a natural day, or a revolution of the earth; and as, moreover, the seventh day is not yet ended, because no new creation has yet taken place; that, therefore, each day measures a space of at least six thousand years. To this argument there seem to me two objections

2

1st. That the assumption that God, since the creation of this earth, or of our system, has ceased to work, is scarcely reconcilable with any rational apprehension of the Deity; and is moreover contrary to the sense of Scripture (Psalm civ. 31; Isaiah xlv, 7; John v. 17); and contrary to the theological views of infant man, whose deities are ever too busy, too personally active; and ever engaged, if not in creating, in mending and rectifying their handywork.

sabbaths. "Ne Judæus quidem, mi Tiberi," says Augustus in a letter to Tiberius, "tam diligenter Sabbatis jejunium servat, quam ego hodie servavi."-Suetonius, August. § 76; and read Casaubon, a. h. 1.; see also Persius, Sat. v. 184; and compare Juvenal, vi, 158; Judith, viii, 5, 6; and x, 2, 3.

9 Luke xiv. 1, 7.

1 I have just met with this argument of Faber's stated in Nimrod,

vol. iv, p. 152, but its tendencies are, it seems to me, misunderstoodif indeed I may speak of the tendencies of a work which it is now many years since I have read.

2 This is clearly the Mahommedan doctrine. "It is God," says the Koran, "who hath created the heavens and the earth, and whatever is between them; and then ascended his throne."-c. xxxii.

And 2dly. That though "day" may be often used for any indefinite time, it surely never is so, when particularized, as it always is in the creation, as morning and evening.

II. By the manner in which the work of each day is distributed throughout the day.

Generally each day represents a volition of the Creator; a creation; and a retrospect by the Deity of that creation. The exceptions are:

1st. The second day: on which day alone God does not look back on his work and declare his pleasure in it.

2dly. The third day: which contains two distinct volitions