time, sent forth by the Almighty Father, as a minister, so to speak, of His willthat there had ever been a time when He was not, when the Son begotten from everlasting was not in the bosom of His Father, when the Eternal Word was not with God.

Fitly, indeed, does the physical, outward, light of this natural world represent that true Light of which we have spoken. In the outward light we have access to the wonders and beauties of creation; in which, as says the Apostle, "the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead." And by the true Light we have access unto the Father even in the glories of the third heaven; "unto mount Sion, the city of the living God, the heavenly

f Rom. i. 20.

Jerusalem; to an innumerable company of Angels, and to the general assembly and Church of the first-born, which are written in heaven. In both cases, "that which doth make manifest is light;" and the sensible darkness which, when we are deprived of earthly light, enwraps us, and shuts out the face of nature, is but the fearful type and figure of that unimagined “outer darkness" which must eternally hide the face of God from those upon whom the light of heaven shall have shone in vain, and to whom is reserved "the blackness of darkness for ever."

AND THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE THE FIRST DAY.

First, then, of the acts of creation, is recorded the calling into operation of that in which all things else were to assume their form, their life, their 8 Heb. xii. 22, 23.

beauty. And thus with reference to that sevenfold division of time which it has pleased God to appoint from the beginning-did He vouchsafe especially to consecrate the first day of the seven: thereon beginning His work of creation, and causing His light to dispel the primæval darkness of nature. The first day of the world was thus a symbolizing and foreshewing of that greatest of days, ordained to be to us the first of days for ever; on which the Church beheld the bursting of her true Light, in all His Divine effulgence, from the darkness of the grave.

Great indeed is that true first day of the week. Great is Easter morning, great the queen of festivals, great the day which thus saw the Sun of Righteousness arise, with healing in His wings, the very shadow of which gives us our weekly festival. Even the heathen, in their dark

est times, had a feeling, or preserved a remembrance, that there was something glorious and excellent in the first day of the week which distinguished it from others. Even they, while they named the other days of the week from the moon and planets, agreed to name this day Sun-day. And the Church in proclaiming to them the truths entrusted to her teaching, unfolded to them the hallowed mystery, unknown to themselves, which was expressed in the term thus employed. She taught them that the first day was, indeed and emphatically, the day of the Sun; the day of the true life-giving luminary of our spiritual system, of whose brightness the visible orb of day is a faint image and shadow. "The evening and the morning were the first day;" and, on that day—as the Church, while traditions of our Lord, now lost, were rife within her, delighted

to remember on that day of the week the Lord created light; on that day the manna first fell in the wilderness; on that day He deigned to be born in the manger of Bethlehem; on that day the star shone on the sages of the east; on that day He fed the five thousand with the loaves and fishes; on that day He submitted to be baptized in the waters of Jordan; on that day He triumphed over principalities and powers, in rising from the grave; and on that day He poured out His Almighty Spirit on the heads of His Apostles in the "rushing mighty wind of Pentecost."

The sabbath has passed away, among the "beggarly elements" of Judaism. "Let no man judge you in respect of an holy day or of the sabbath,” of the Jewish calendar. The rest of the seventh day was but the type and anticipation of that rest, which is the Christian Church's