---
title: 'Plumer on One-Seventh of Our Time'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2025-08-25
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2025-plumer-on-one-seventh-of-our-time
---

# Plumer on One-Seventh of Our Time

“No man can seriously read and consider this precept \[the Fourth Commandment\] without seeing that it is of vast importance. It is a law claiming to regulate a *seventh* portion of human life. If a man lives twenty-one years, this law claims the entire control of three of them; if he lives fifty years, it disposes of more than *seven* of them. It is therefore important.

But it also devotes this portion of time to *religious* purposes; and these are the highest ends of life. All other time is secular. This is holy. That *may* be occupied with things which perish in the using. This *must* be given to things which take hold on eternity.” — [**William S. Plumer**](/authors/william-swan-plumer), *The Law of God, as Contained in the Ten Commandments, Explained and Enforced* (1864), pp. 289-290