Not long since, on hearing it related that a certain minister was accustomed, in the stated exercises of the sanctuary, to pray for those able to labour hard through the week, but too ill to attend public worship on the Sabbath, our attention was especially directed to this suffering class of our fellow beings; and as the disease is far more prevalent than is generally imagined, and it is thought to be contagious—as whole families usually have it when the head is materially affected—and frightfully dangerous, it seems but an act of humanity to give the alarm.
When the directors of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway resolved to run trains on the Lord’s Day, William Burns announced his intention of holding open-air services at the Haymarket (the Edinburgh terminus in those days), at the hours of departure and arrival of the trains.
The Lord’s day was appointed to be an earnest and sign of our everlasting rest, the rest that remains for the people of God. It is intended to remind us of heaven, to fit us for heaven, and to give some comfortable pledges and foretastes of the joys and glories of that blessed state, to all those who have their conversation in heaven, and their affections set upon things above. These are the days of heaven; and if heaven be an everlasting sabbath, surely sabbaths are a heaven upon earth, in them the tabernacle of God is with men.
