7. _And if possible, the facts that have been supplied by the testimony of medical and other scientific men have been still more valuable and triumphant._--Recent physiological inquiries have placed it beyond doubt that man needs for repairing the waste of his body not only the nightly repose which night brings him, but, in addition, the weekly rest of a seventh day; and it has been noticed that in many of the industrial departments, especially in the more skilled and delicate forms of industry, there was a perceptible deterioration in what was produced in the last days of the week. Travellers on long journeys who have "rested the first day of the week according to the commandment," have outstripped travellers who pursued their journey on the seventh day, and have reached the end of their journey in far better health and spirits. The railway system itself, which, with all its other high advantages, has done not a little to disturb the integrity of our Sabbath rest, has strangely supplied us with valuable corroboration on this matter; for during the period in which our principal railways were in course of construction in Scotland and England, it was found that the work which those who laboured on Sabbath executed in seven days was generally less in amount and worse in execution than that done by sober, orderly, Sabbath-keeping men in six days.
And the same remark is applicable to labourers with the head as with the hand; for in these days we must extend the phrase, "working men," far beyond the comparatively narrow region of the industrial arts. The statesman or the barrister who does not allow himself the weekly pause in his round of mental labour which the Sabbath of God offers him, soon finds nature punishing him for his disregard of its great laws; and instances are not rare, and some of them stand out as beacons in our modern biography, in which such a course has carried him that followed it, in the very noon-tide of his life, to the maniac's cell or the suicide's grave; while many a noble mind has retained its spring and freshness, and has been able to "serve its generation" to the last, by allowing the Sabbath to interpose its hallowed associations and exercises in the midst of its common and absorbing studies. Our great Coleridge strongly and beautifully said, "I feel as if God, by giving the Sabbath, had given fifty-two springs in the year;" and Isaac Taylor, a very voluminous author, and one of the most popular and philosophical of our theological writers, gives the following as the testimony of his long experience: "I am prepared to affirm that to the studious especially, and whether younger or older, a Sabbath well spent--spent in happy exercises of the heart, devotional and domestic--a Sabbath given to the soul, is the best of all means of refreshment to the mere intellect."
There is a point, moreover, at which the physiology of this great subject touches closely on its moral and religious bearings, for it has been found that physical weariness leads to mental lassitude, and that mental lassitude indisposes the soul to moral considerations. Nor would it be easy to calculate to what an extent the recurrence of the Sabbath, where its hours have been turned to their proper and appointed uses, has been of moral advantage to our commercial men and our merchant princes, checking the fever of reckless speculation, restoring the moral balance of the mind, and "winding up the soul, which the body had poised down, to a higher degree of heavenliness." "A Sunday in solitude," said one of the greatest English statesmen of the last age, "never failed to restore me to myself." Facts like these, which might be almost indefinitely multiplied, do more than demonstrate the inestimable value of the Sabbath: they appear to me to suggest, on their own independent grounds, that an institution possessing such wise and benignant adaptations to our complex nature, must have been appointed by Him that made us and who "knows our frame;" and that "while the Sabbath was made _for_ man, it was not made _by_ him." A great writer on natural religion has founded a beautiful argument for the existence and unity of God, on the adaptation of day and night to the physical nature of man: might not an argument of equal soundness and force for the Divine origin of the Sabbath, be founded on its adaptation to our physical, intellectual, and spiritual nature?