Bible Commentaries

Exodus 31:3-4

The ambition of art, to come ever nearer to a perfect work, is an evidence that the spirit of the Master-Artist stirs and quickens the human spirit. "See, I have filled him with the spirit of God, in Exodus 31:13

If we measure things not as they were divinely intended, nor as they are in themselves, but as they are subjectively entertained, it might be a question whether the Scottish Sabbath was not for200 years a greater Christian Sacrament, a larger, more vital, and more influential fact in the Christianity of the country than the annual or sometimes semi-annual celebration of the Lord's Supper, or the initiatory rite of Baptism, or both together.... We are born, on each Lord's day morning, into a new climate, a new atmosphere; and in that new atmosphere (so to speak), by the law of a renovated nature, the lungs and heart of the Christian life should spontaneously and continuously drink in the vital air.

—W. E. Gladstone, Later Gleanings, pp342 f.

Where every day is not the Lord"s, the Sunday is His least of all.

—George Macdonald, Donal Grant, chap. VII.

There is a deep Christian instinct in England, an instinct which has come down to us through many generations, and for the last350 years at any rate, founded in a large measure on Puritan belief, fed by what may be called the "two Puritan Sacraments"—the Bible and Sunday.

—Father Dolling in The Pilot (10 Nov, 1900).

References.—XXXII.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xli. No2398. XXXII:1.— W. C. E. Newbolt, Church Times, vol. xxxii1894 , p244. W. C. Magee, Outlines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p28. XXXII:1-8 , 30-35.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— Exodus , etc, p171. XXXII:1-29.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. liii. No2884.