recreation. Perhaps a better general rule cannot be laid down than this, that the same proportion of the Sabbath, on the whole, should be devoted to religious exercises, public and private, as every man would spend of any other day in his ordinary business. The holy work of the Sabbath, like all other work, to be done well requires intermissions. An entire day is a longer space of time than the human mind can employ with alacrity upon any one subject. The austerity, therefore, of those is little to be commended, who require that all the intervals of public worship, and whatever remains of the day after the public duty is satisfied, should be spent in the closet, in private prayer and retired meditation. Nor are persons in the lower ranks of society to be very severely censured, those especially who are confined to populous cities, where they breathe a noxious atmosphere, and are engaged in unwholesome occupations, from which, with their daily subsistence, they derive their daily poison, — if they take advantage of the leisure of the day to recruit their wasted strength and harassed spirits, by short excursions into the purer air of the adjacent villages, and the innocent recreations of sober society; provided they engage not in schemes of dissipated and tumultuous pleasure, which may disturb the sobriety of their thoughts, and interfere with the duties of the day. The present humour of the common people leads, perhaps, more to a profanation of the festival, than to a superstitious rigour in the observance of it but in the attempt to reform, we shall

do wisely to remember, that the thanks for this are chiefly due to the base spirit of puritanical hypocrisy, which in the last century opposed and defeated the wise attempts of government, to regulate the recreations of the day by authority, and prevent the excesses which have actually taken place, by a rational indulgence.

The Sabbath was ordained for a day of public worship, and of refreshment to the common people. It cannot be a day of their refreshment if it be made a day of mortified restraint. To be a day of worship, it must be a day of leisure from worldly business, and of abstraction from dissipated pleasure. But it need not be a dismal one. It was ordained for a day of general and willing resort to the holy mountain; when men of every race, and every rank, and every age, promiscuously,-Hebrew, Greek, and Scythian, bond and free,- young and old,-high and low, rich and poor, one with another, laying hold of Christ's atonement, and the proffered mercy of the Gospel, might meet together before their common Lord, exempt for a season from the cares and labours of the world, and be "joyful in his house of prayer."

RICHARD MANT, D.D.

BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR.

From his "Sermons for Parochial and Domestic Use, chiefly adapted to the Service of Particular Sundays in the Year. By Richard Mant, D.D. (now Lord Bishop of Down and Connor,) late Domestic Chaplain to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury. 1823."