Having been called to this position by your suffrages, dear brethren, while shrinking from the prominence and responsibility of the post, I thank you for the honour conferred upon me, and trust that the year of office now entered upon may be fruitful in much blessing to our Associated Churches, consolidating our union, enlarging our borders that in the Lord's work in our beloved Association we may all take the deepest and most active interest. Individual effort can do much when rightly directed and prayerfully sustained, but when numbers unite in any good work, labouring on such lines as ours, success is certain. It now behoves me to address you upon a subject left to my own selection, and yet I trust it has not…

Without stopping to dwell on the rest of the Sabbath, which God instituted when He had completed the fair work of creation, as He gazed with complacent eye on every form of beauty, as it came forth into being perfected by His creative power, He pronounced it very good, He rested and sanctified the Sabbath day for ever; nor can we tarry to speak of the rest of God's Israel, in the land of Canaan, after He had led them about and instructed them for forty years in the wilderness, although their conduct, their wanderings, and God's gracious dealings with them, their final possession