Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE SABBATH IN THE PATRIARCHAL AGE. The Bible, it is said, " contains no example of any man keeping a Sabbath before the time of Moses;" nor does it in any way make mention of a Sabbath from the creation to the giving of manna in the wilderness— a period of two thousand five hundred years; and how could this be, if it were during all that period an existing institution?! This objection is made up of two parts, a fact asserted, and an inference from it. The fact asserted is, that no mention is made of a Sabbath during the period in question; the inference is, therefore, at that time, there was no Sabbath. 1. Suppose we admit the fact asserted; does the inference follow ? By no means. For, (1.) the history of that whole period is given in a single book and twelve chapters of another. If, then, there be no mention of the Sabbath in a history so brief; it is not surprising, nor is it any proof that it did not exist. But, (2.) the Sabbath is mentioned only five times in the Jewish Scriptures, prophetic and historical both, from the time of Moses to the return of the captivity Grew, p. 3. t The argument, substantially, of Paley and all that class of writers. — a period of one thousand years; twice in prophecy, and three times in history. And, (3.) in the entire histories of Joshua, of the Judges, of Samuel, and of Saul, — a period of about five hundred years, — the Sabbath is not mentioned once. Had they no Sabbath, then ? (4.) From Joshua to Jeremiah, a period of eight hundred years, not one word is said of circumcision. Had they no circumcision, then ? In all these cases, the history is much more minute and full than in the other. If the silence of the record is conclusive in the one case, it is more so in the others. But is it conclusive ? Were the ...