Chap. IV.]

97

\

OBSERVANCE OF SUNDAY.

labor, and rest, and refreshment of the body and mind. We arerequired to keep it holy, that is, to set it apart from a common toa special and sacred use. This requires the appropriation of it toan attendance on public worship, and includes the more generalduty, of employing it in every suitable way, for the purpose ofmoral and religious improvement. Religious assemblies underthe name of “holy convocations,”* were accustomed to be heldon the Hebrew Sabbath; and we have full evidence, that a com-pliance with the same custom was considered a personal anduniversal duty on the Christian Sunday from the beginning, fBesides attendance on public worship, reading, meditation, pri-vate prayer, the instruction of children and servants, are theappropriate and important duties of Sunday. The latter class ofpersons, especially, must he instructed on this day, or they will,too probably, receive no instruction at all.

(3.) The appropriation of a part of the Sunday to the elemen-tary moral and religious instruction of children, especially poorchildren, and of adults who stand in need of such instruction,and are willing to receive it, may justly be regarded as one ofthe greatest moral improvements of modern times. In Sundayschools, — those humble seminaries of charitable education,—many hundreds of thousands of children are nurtured in the waysof righteousness, not a few of whom would otherwise have beenbrought up in neglect, irreligion, and probably crime. Thesenurseries of education, morals, and piety are founded on theprinciple recommended by Solomon and sanctioned by all ex-perience,— of training up the child in the way he should go, that,when he is old, he may not depart from it. The experience ofall times demonstrates, that the character of the man is built onthe principles instilled into the mind of the child. In further-ance of the original plan, too, the conductors of Sunday schools,in this country, have very extensively instituted libraries of choicebooks for the instruction of the young under their charge ; andthey meditate no less an enterprise, than the elementary moraland religious education of the entire youthful population of the

* Exod. xii. 16; Levit. xxiii. 7, &c.

t Heb. x. 25; John xx. 19, 26; Acts xx. 6, 7; I Cor. xvi. 1, 2; Rev. i. 10

13