This book is dedicated to Noel Mason, a true yoke-fellow and preacher of the gospel, who often disagrees with me and who is frequently right. For some things of worth in this manuscript that I would have missed, I owe a debt to my friend, Noel Mason.
With his usual courtesy, but none the less with obvious concern, he has time and again intimated that I must not skimp this task. He is in no way responsible for the blemishes of the finished work, but he is to be thanked for drawing invaluable materials to my attention.
As ever, I am indebted to my long-suffering wife Gill. An author and a home-spun theologian in her own right, she has yet been content to forego creativity and perform the hack work of preparing this manuscript for photo-printing. This is the fifth lengthy book she has typed for me, and with no housework in return from her debtor.
She has tolerated a continuing whirlwind of books and papers and an absent-minded, all absorbed consort, whoever thinks that home is a place for unremitting toil. I know no other woman who would stand it. Occasionally her typing style may seem to strangely falter or change. All such blemishes are her husband's fault. His temperament is so perverse that he ever demands of today's work that it be finished yesterday, if not sooner.
Because of this, when the real master mistress of the work has had her back turned, and left the typewriter unguarded, he has typed some of the pages. The results are here and there perceivable, and the blame is his alone. The following papers on the Sabbath, prepared at different times over the last twenty years, are not written in the style of my Daniel commentary, or university thesis, The Abomination of Desolation in Biblical Eschatology.
