of observing the Sabbath. There is little danger of the day being kept too strictly in the present age. There is far more danger of its being profaned and forgotten entirely. Let us contend earnestly for its preservation among us in all its integrity. We may rest assured that national prosperity and personal growth in grace, are intimately bound up in the maintenance of a holy Sab- bath.*
* The concluding words of the passage now expounded are re- markable. " The Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath." They have received some rather strange interpretations, which it may be well to notice.
1. Chrysostom, Grotius, Calovius, and others, think that the " son of man" in this place means " any man," any one naturally born of the family of Adam, and not Christ Himself. To say nothing of the ob- jections that might be brdught against the doctrine involved in such a sense, it is an unanswerable objection that the expression " son of man" is never used in this way in the New Testament. Whitby says that it occurs eighty-eight times, and always applies to Christ.
2. Others say that our Lord's meaning is, to assert His own right to dispense with the observance of the fourth commandment. This however seems a very unsatisfactory interpretation. Our Lord de- clares plainly in one place, that He came " not to destroy the law but to fulfil." He challenges the Jews in another place to convict him of any breach of the law : " which of you convinceth me of sin ?" His enemies, when they brought Him at last before Caiaphas, did not charge Him with breaking the fourth commandment. No doubt they would have done so had he given them occasion, either by His teaching or practice.
The true meaning appears to be, that our Lord claims the right to iispense with all the traditional rules, and man-made laws about the Sabbath, with which the Pharisees had overloaded the day of rest. As Son of man, who came not to destroy but to save, He asserts His power to set free the blessed Sabbath from the false and superstitious notions with which the Rabbins had clogged and poisoned it, and to