In the thirty-fifth chapter of Exodus we read: "Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations on the Sabbath day." The penalty affixed to the violation of this command is, that all the congregation shall bring him without the camp and stone him with stones (Num. xv. 32).
In its literal and material import wherever a fire would be needed on other days, this statute would be unreasonable in its demand and brutal and severe in its punishment. Even the most scrupulous and exact of puritanic materialists exclude this statute from their rigid exactions of Sabbath ceremonies and observances. And the most opaque materialists already discern, that common sense and common humanity ever asserting themselves in the vanguard of Christian progress, have rendered this much of the Scriptures obsolete from any standpoint of material observance.
But in its spiritual significance as it must have fallen from the lips of Moses upon the veiled hearts of the old Hebrews, this statute both in its demand, and in its method of punishment, will furnish a beautiful lesson of practical importance so long as humanity shall be found struggling through the wilderness of human beliefs, out from the land of Egypt, and on to the land of promise.
