Nehemiah 10:31

And if the people of the land bring ware or any victuals on the sabbath day to all

The profit of Sabbath-keeping

John Brand was an old Cornish fisherman.

The fishing had not been good for some days, the water had been wild and stormy; but at length, on the Sunday, the weather became fine, and the other fishermen said, “We would keep Sunday--but--we have had so few fish lately; and we are sorry to go out to-day--but--the weather is so good. It is a pity; we would not go if we were not so poor.” “What!” said honest John, “are you going to break God’s laws with your ifs and buts? Better be poor than be wicked. My religion is not the kind that shifts with the wind. ‘Thou shalt remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy’--that is enough for me.” So he persuaded them, and they took his advice, and spent the day in worshipping God. And it was well they did so; for that night, just when the boats would have been coming back, a terrible storm suddenly burst over the deep, and lasted two days. Any boat out in that weather would certainly have been wrecked. But two days after the beautiful weather returned, and more fish were taken then than had been caught for weeks before. No; no one ever yet lost by obeying God. Be you like John Brand; be thorough, honest, and God-fearing in and out; do not have a religion like a weathercock that shifts with the wind, or one that can be broken with An “if” or a “but.” (J. Reid Howatt.)

The Sabbath beneficial

In a prize essay on the Sabbath written by a journeyman printer in Scotland, there appears the following striking passage: “Yoke-fellows, think how the abstraction of the Sabbath would hopelessly enslave the working-classes with whom we are identified. Think of the labour thus going on in one monotonous, and continuous, and eternal cycle--limbs for ever on the rack, the fingers for ever plying, the eyeballs for ever straining, the brow for ever sweating, the feet for ever plodding, the brain for ever throbbing, the shoulders for ever drooping, the loins for ever aching, and the restless mind for ever 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 it would exhaust, of the aspirations it would crush, of the sickness it would breed, of the projects it would wreck, of the groans it would extort, of the lives it would immolate, of the cheerless graves it would prematurely dig! See them toiling and moiling, sweating and fretting, grinding and hewing, weaving and spinning, sowing and gathering, mowing and reaping, raising mad building, digging mad 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 days of brightness and of gloom. What a sad picture would the world present if we had no Sabbath!”