The remarks given above from Dr. Conquest have been borne out by all history and observation. Some years ago, Mr. Wilberforce endeavoured to persuade certain lawyers and barristers that Sunday occupations and consultations would shorten their days. They laughed at his fanaticism, sneered at him as a “Saint,” and were quite ready to “Charivari” him; but all these mockers died before their time. Some of them became melancholy imbeciles, and more than one committed suicide. We cannot, my Lord, violate the laws of God, whether written on the digestive organs, muscles and brain, or in the Bible, without having to pay the dire penalty of rebellion against the benevolent regulations of our heavenly Father.
We have heard a great deal of late concerning the Anglo-Saxon race, and its native vigour, enterprise, intelligence, &c. All our greatness has been attributed to physical causes, and these causes have been supposed to originate in the purity of our race. But the argument is absurd, because we are the most mixed and mongrel people under heaven. We have all sorts of blood in our veins. We are a compound of Ancient Britons, Romans, Scots, Irish, Saxons, Danes, Normans, French, Germans, Phenicians, &c., &c. And yet we boast of being Anglo-Saxons!! There is more scepticism than science in this vaunting. Men are unwilling to do homage to Christianity, and “to render to God the things that are God’s.” We owe all to the Bible and the Sabbath. The former, by circulating sound principles among us, has given us vigorous minds, and the latter by the repose of one day in seven, has imparted to us healthy physical constitutions. The rest from toil and worldly anxiety; the soothing associations of leisure, home, moral principle, and religious hope, have wrought wonders on our muscles, nerves, brain, and digestive organs, and thus have given us vigorous bodies; intrepid, enterprising, and persevering minds; moral courage; and honourable, humane, and philanthropic sentiments. What made the sturdy men of the Reformation and of the Commonwealth, but the Bible and the Sabbath? And if Anglo-Saxon must be a synonym for physical vigour and moral courage, then history, science, philosophy, and religion allow us to say, that the Bible and the Sabbath would make Anglo-Saxons of the Celts, the French, the Germans, the Chinese, and of all the world. Our venerableancestors, both Episcopalians and Puritans, who built up the British constitution and rendered it the wonder, the glory, and terror of the world, saw that man must have a day of rest, and therefore made it a statute of the realm that labour should cease on the Lord’s-day; and we owe our national preeminence to their wisdom and piety. You ought therefore, my Lord, to hesitate before you remove those “ancient landmarks which your fathers set up”; for you may rest assured that as soon as you break up the good old Sabbath observance habits of our forefathers, and introduce, in its stead, Sunday labour and dissipation, you will hear no more of the vigour of the Anglo-Saxon race; for with a continental Sabbath you will have continental frivolity, effeminacy, fickleness, and revolutions; and it may be well for your Lordship to consider whether under such a change the nobility of England will share better than the clergy, the gentry, the nobles and princes of France under the reign of terror. The Bible and the Sabbath, if duly studied and observed, would have saved that country from all the melancholy and frightful calamities which it has had to suffer during the last sixty or seventy years.
Everyone, my Lord, who advocates Sunday labour, is not only an enemy to the working man, but an adversary to the country at large. It is impossible for such a man to be a patriot, because he endeavours to undermine the physical and moral vigour of the empire. It is no use to say, that in opening the Crystal Palace on the Sabbath, you advocate the amusement and not the labour of the masses; because you are going to doom one body of your countrymen to toil that they may enrich and please others. And depend upon it, when it is generally understood that railway directors can haveseven days’ labourfor fifteen or twenty shillings a week, other masters will exact the same hard terms from their workpeople. They will naturally ask, Who are we that we should pay as much forsix days, as the railway lords do forseven? The certain result to the working classes will be increased labour and diminished wages; and thus under this pretence of giving Sunday recreation to operatives and others, one of the most deadly injuries will be inflicted upon them. They have often been duped by designing demagogues, but now it seems Conservative Lords and Radical Dissenters are to be their deceivers. Of old Herod and Pontius Pilate were made friends when the Son of God was to be crucified; and in our time, we have lords and plebeians, Conservatives, Whigs, Radicals, Chartists, Atheists, debauchees, Episcopalians and ultra-Dissenters—all leagued together to rob the poor brethren of Jesus Christ, of their day of rest, and the ten thousand blessings connected therewith. We congratulate you, my Lord, on your companions, coadjutors, and fellow labourers: though we know that you must not hope much from the certain result of your zeal. It is often said that our Norman nobility have never naturalized themselves in this foreign land, and the present effort to destroy the physical and moral greatness of the nation by Sunday labour will go far to prove that they have not as yet become English patriots. Sabbath amusement for one class will be Sabbath slavery to another; and as thisSabbath labour and desecration increases, the nation will fall and will most certainly involve the nobility in its ruin.
Much is said of recreation and comfort for the working classes, but we must be just before we are generous, and not forget the rights and happiness of those who are to be worked. I have before said that England owes much to its domestic circles and its homes. “Home! sweet Home!” is an air which charms everyone among us; but do away with the Sabbath, and you destroy the English home. “Mother,” said a child, “you seem so happy always on a Sunday, I wish it were Sunday every day.” “You are always better on a Sunday when father’s at home,” said a little girl to her sick mother. Another said, “Oh, we are so uncomfortable to-day, it don’t seem like Sunday, because father has been at work all day, and has not cleaned himself.” “Don’t the sun always shine brighter on the Sunday? and it is never such nasty wet rain on a Sunday as on other days,” exclaimed another group of children. But the sick wife of the railway servant, and the fond children, are to know nothing of these Sabbath endearments. Sunday suns and Sunday rains will be week day suns and rains to them, and this will continue from year’s end to year’s end. Really, my Lord, as a religious individual, and consequently a very feeling, sympathetic, and humane man, you ought to hesitate before you resolve to destroy domestic ties and affections to which your country owes so much of its happiness, prosperity, and greatness. Your good Lady, the Duchess of Sutherland, and others, are calling loudly upon the Americans to pity the poor negro, and we beg your Lordship to have some compassion for these intended Crystal Palace slaves, and not allow their homes to be broken up and their wives to be as widows and their children orphans.
The idea, my Lord, that large numbers of the masses will run down to the Crystal PalaceeverySunday is an idle fancy. What will it cost for a man to take his wife and children to Sydenham? In many instances from six to ten shillings will be needed! Will Mr. Mayhew’s Spitalfields weavers be able to spare this sum? How many times a year will they go? How many of them will go? For unless they go very often, we are afraid that their moral improvement will not be very great; and, during the Sabbaths that the people stay at home, there will be no very great diminution of the crowds that occupy the filthy lanes and alleys of London. Will enough on any one Sunday leave their houses to cause any visible decrease of the inhabitants? Will whole families go? or will there not be a separation of its members—some gone to the Crystal Palace, and coming home drunk or ruined, while the poor wife and other portions of the household will be left in solitude at home? One would suppose, to hear some people talk, that as soon as Sydenham is opened, all the miserable wretches in London, all the ragged half starved creatures, and especially all the poor operatives in Spitalfields, will, by some magic or miracle, be well clothed, have plenty of cash in their pockets, and after going to church very devoutly one half of the Sabbath, hurry away in full glee to the Crystal Palace on the other, and thustheir future Sundays all through the year will be passed between the celestial paradise of the temple and the earthly Elysium at Sydenham!! No one after this will laugh, if a new body of speculators should arise and propose to take these said paupers and operatives to visit the moon and all the planets every Lord’s-day. And thus, my Lord, for an imagined good, which it would be the most arrant folly to anticipate, you are about to sacrifice the home comforts, the health, the morals, and the lives of a large number of the most valuable of your countrymen. The same principle that led you to legislate respecting cruelty to animals, and to the men, women, and children in factories and mines, calls upon you to interpose the authority of the law, and say to the Sydenham gentlemen, “There shall be no labour on the Sabbath.”
We are told that if the men hire themselves out to this drudgery it will be avoluntaryact of their own. Granted, my Lord; but still when a husband and father, who has a wife and family crying for bread, is told that he may have employment if he will break the Sabbath, but that famine shall be the result of his resting on the Lord’s-day, there is great danger that many will prefer transgression to poverty and want. All persecutors are perfect voluntaries. It was quite optional for Stephen to be stoned; for the disciples to be imprisoned; for Huss, Latimer, and Hooper to be burnt; for the pilgrim fathers to emigrate to America; and for the Madiai to go to gaol. Persecutors are among the fairest people under heaven. They generally set comfort and torture, life and death, before their victims, and give them a perfect choice of either. Formerly burning was fashionable; but now starvation is nearly all the rage. We do not burn people in this enlightened day. We are too refined, for we live in the nineteenth century, to be sure. No persecution now, forsooth, we are too humane for that. We only say to the famishing operative or peasant, “You must go to church, or starve!” “you must go to chapel, or starve!” “you must spend your Sabbaths on Sydenham Railway, or starve!” Now I really think, my Lord, if you had your choice, notwithstanding all our boasting of religious liberty and charity, that you would as soon be burnt by Bonner as starved to death, wife, family and all, by these more refined modern persecutors. For say what you will, Sunday labour is not only inhuman and cruel, but it is persecution, and ought to be as much restrained by the hand of the law as any other oppression which would prevent men from worshipping God. I knew one of the best of men in London leave his fatherland and become an emigrant because of the Sunday labour at the Post Office, and thus the government lost a good servant by this persecution. And we shall soon have on a large scale a new race of pilgrim fathers, who will seek refuge in a foreign land that they may enjoy the Sabbath which they are refused in their own Christian country. To turn a man off from work because he fears God and keeps the Sabbath is persecution. The civil government is as much bound to protect the day for worship as the temple in which the man worships.
Again we repeat, we desire no interference with the religious opinions of anyone. Let men spend their Sabbath as they please,provided they do not compel others to any unnecessary work. The laws respecting murder, theft, cruelty to animals, prisons, nuisances, factory labour, do not interfere with the religion of Catholic, Protestant, Episcopalian, or Dissenter. They merely protect the health, the bodies and rights of the people, and on these principles we call on the legislature in the name of humanity, of justice, of health, life, right, and freedom, to prohibit Sabbath labour.
Drowning men catch at straws, and you are in danger, my Lord, of being seduced by certain individuals who call themselves liberal dissenters, and profess to expound the sentiments of their brethren. They will tell you that you must not legislate to prevent the poor man from being robbed and killed by Sunday labour, because it is a religious question!! But you must beware of these gentlemen. They have not the confidence of their brethren, nor do they represent their views. Their sentiments are as outrageous as they are ultra. To say that Dissent allows the working man to be robbed and slain by oppressive masters; to be starved to death, or persecuted into exile, is one of the foulest libels that has ever been uttered. These men have not yet learnt the duties of civil legislation. They have not distinguished between physical and religious—between bodily and spiritual matters; they have not learnt that in some points human and divine legislation must go hand in hand; nor have they ascertained where the one is to stop or where the two are to diverge. A man who holds with a “Ten Hours Bill,” with laws to prevent cruelty to women, children, and animals; with statutes to prevent murder, theft, and swindling, and yet protests that you must not protect the bodies of men from Sabbath labour, is a novice in humanity, and has yet to learn his political alphabet. Sabbath labour is inhuman; Sabbath labour is robbery; Sabbath labour is cruelty; Sabbath labour is persecution; Sabbath labour is deadly; and therefore ought to be restrained by the authority of the law.
Some of them become very religious and tell you that every day, under the Christian dispensation, is to be a Sabbath; but they do not mean what they say. Sabbath, my Lord, signifiesRESTfrom labour; and if every day is to be a Sabbath, then we must rest from labour everyday, and never do any work at all! Jehovah has said, “six days shalt thou labour and do all that thou hast to do, but the seventh is the DAY OF REST.” Rest from labour is one of theessentialideas included in the word Sabbath; and these pious people say that every day is to be aSabbath, and therefore a day ofrestfrom toil; for where there is no cessation from labour, there is noSabbathin the scriptural meaning of the term. But so perverted are these reasoners, that they tell us though Sabbath means rest from labour, yet people are now at perfect liberty to work all the day, and Sydenham adventurers ought therefore to be allowed to rob, demoralize, and kill a portion of the population by Sunday toil!! The reasoning of these gentlemen is as logical as their legislation is liberal and humane.
“Ah, but” they say, “The Sabbath is abolished!” But where, my Lord, is the repeal mentioned? “Oh,” they gravely reply, “The Sabbathwas made for man.” That is, it was benevolently instituted for the rest of his physical frame and the edification of his soul.Ergo, it is abolished!! Glorious reasoning, my Lord! But still they argue, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”Ergo, the Sabbath is abrogated, and he is the Lord of a nonentity!!
“Nomanis to judge us in respect of new moons and Sabbaths.”Ergo, theLordis not to judge us, although he has given us the ten commandments, and told us that they are not abolished, and that the law is not in any point made void by faith.
“The day is changed from the seventh to the first.Ergo, it is abolished!!”Changeandabolitionsynonyms!! The Apostles for a while observed the seventh day that they might preach to the Jews, and thefirstday that they might assemble as Christians, and at length, in obedience to their Lord’s will, theseinspiredmen dropped the seventh and kept the first alone, but retained the spirit of the law by assemblingevery seventhday, and therefore, to be sure, broke up the Sabbath altogether!! Whether these are “sequiturs” or “non sequiturs,” I leave your Lordship to judge.
But then we are so spiritual in these Gospel days, that we do not need a Sabbath.Ergo, we show our spirituality bysecularizingthe Sabbath!! Of course we are more spiritual than the Creator who consecrated one day in seven; more spiritual than Adam in innocency; than Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, the Prophets, our Lord, or the Apostles; and therefore we can do without such vulgar things as Sabbaths or religious instruction. Doubtless the Gospel has given us iron nerves and muscles to labour incessantly; and now forsooth we are all born with instinctive morality, theology, and devotion, and can do without such old fashioned, obsolete lumber as religious edification! And yet, my Lord, we who thus boast are the most Mammon worshipping, worldly minded people under heaven. We are so spiritually minded that we wish the labourer to worksevendays instead ofsix; that we open the Crystal Palace on Sundays for the sole purpose of getting money out of the pockets of the people! We are so spiritual that almost everything we do is contaminated with selfishness! We are so evangelical and heavenly that we are robbing and killing our fellow creatures by Sunday labour, and are agitating to increase these hecatombs of human victims offered to avarice. “The Song of the Shirt” is no exaggeration, and therefore what a spiritual and benevolent people we must be! What wicked fellows those infidels are who doubt the divine origin of this cruel caricature of Christianity which we give them in our deeds, and how depraved they must be to say to such spiritually minded souls, “What do ye more than others?” What a blessed proof of heavenly mindedness, that we can rob men of their Sabbath and lives, and then thank God that we are not as other men are!
“But the early Christians did not legislate concerning the Sabbath,” say your new friends. But then you know, my Lord, that they did not ask the government to make any laws against murder or theft; they did not agitate against slavery; for the franchise; forcorn-laws, or their repeal; for the Union, or “The Separation of the Church and State,” &c. &c.; and if we imitate them, we shall give up civil legislation altogether. What Paul would have done, if he had been a Member of Parliament, we can hardly say; still, we may safely affirm that he would as soon have voted to keep men from being robbed, persecuted, and killed by Sabbath labour, as he would for a bill to prevent cruelty to men, women, children, or animals, and would hardly have dreamt that in so doing he was violating the great principles of religious liberty.
Another favourite argument which some use and urge, they tell us, “with tears in their eyes,” is that you will draw people from the gin palaces. That is, my Lord, you are “to do evil that good may come.” You have committed ONE great crime by licensing men to poison, corrupt, and destroy the population by strong drink; and now you are to give a royal charter for a second crime, that you may counteract the first! This is adding sin to sin. Why not shut up all public houses on the Sabbath? It is as much our duty to do so as to legislate concerning the sale of stinking fish, or to prevent any nuisance which endangers the health and rights of the people. And then do you think, my Lord, that these gin palace visitors will go every Sunday to Sydenham? Some of them now idle away one, two, or three days a week in pothouses, and spend money enough to pay for sight seeing and a railway excursion every week. Will Sabbath breaking and the Crystal Palace convert them into pious men and women? “Credat Judæus.”
There are at present in London several parks, which any of these persons may visit for nothing, and without enslaving any of their fellow citizens to minister to their amusement; and therefore it is perfectly superfluous to open the Sydenham Railway on the Sabbath. London, for its wide thoroughfares, fine buildings, and extensive walks, is one of the most healthy and splendid cities in the world; and is continually being made more and more so. Why then wish to license by royal charter a system of amusement which must be attended with Sabbath desecration and the slavery of the workmen employed in conducting it? Besides, if there are not walks enough, let others be made, that the masses may have all the resources of health at command without injury to the domestic comforts, rights, and liberties of any of their fellow citizens. We do not want to shut every man, woman, and child up on a Sabbath. All that we desire is, that Sunday labour shall be restrained by law; and we demand this on the same broad principle of justice that we ask for any regulation connected with the civil rights of the country.
It is a fact that numbers of those who now keep public houses, &c., would be glad to have a general law passed to close them on the Sabbath. At a public dinner of licensed victuallers and publicans in Manchester last October, one of the speakers, who had several houses and carried on a large trade, entreated his brethren to shut up on the Sabbath; and assured them that he always did so himself, and had been a great gainer in consequence of the improved character of hisservants, which arose from their being allowed to rest on the Sabbath, and attend to their moral improvement. Our gin palaces might all be closed on the Lord’s-day, and then there would be no drunken population on the Sunday, and no need of a Sydenham claptrap to pretend to cure one crime by the committal of another.
Most of our pseudo philanthropists who are agitating for Sabbath recreations, are after all no real friends to the masses. They seem to take it for granted that operatives and labourers should never have any time for amusement but on a Sunday; and that nature intended them to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for twelve or fourteen hours during every week-day. But we protest against this cruel creed. Let taxes be lowered, national expenditure economised, sinecures abolished, peace and free trade with all countries be cultivated; let especially the taxes on knowledge be repealed, and the lords and squires show that they are patriots by giving up their pensions and refusing to receive such enormous salaries; let the wages of the labourer and mechanic be just and equitable, and let the nobility, clergy, gentry, and religious people do their duty by teaching and encouraging provident and moral habits; and then the working men and women of England will be able to enjoy week-day recreation much more frequently than they would go to the Crystal Palace on a Sunday: and thus they will be saved the moral deterioration which must invariably attend on Sabbath desecration, and will have no need to enslave any of their brethren to minister to their happiness.
It is said we are losing hold of the masses. But, my Lord, this is a great delusion. The fact is we have never as yet laid hold of them as a body; and we have not done so, because we have never used the proper means. And yet, bad as things are, I never walked through any of the worst haunts of London without being assured by persons of age and experience, that things are not half so bad as they were twenty or thirty years ago. And the improvement is going on. There are more churches, chapels, and schools than were in existence in former years, and more persons attending them; there never was in the whole history of the country so many of the masses found in the house of God, or under a course of religious instruction; and the only thing that can prevent this reformation from going on, is Sabbath labour and the opening such places as the Crystal Palace on the Lord’s-day. I have, Sabbath after Sabbath, preached in Sion Chapel, Whitechapel, to between three and four thousand persons, most of them operatives from Spitalfields and the neighbourhood, and yet within a stone’s throw the Rev. Mr. Champneys had Whitechapel Church thronged; and just at hand other churches and chapels were well filled. It is untrue to talk of our losing hold of the masses; they never attended on the house of God in such numbers as now, nor were they ever in so favourable a condition to be won by Christian exertion. Infidelity, trades unions, socialism, halls of sciences, dissipation, thieving, &c., &c., have all failed, and they are now literally waiting to be gathered to the fold of Christ. But if they were not, the man who would suppose, that opening a Crystal Palace on Sundayswould supply these poor souls with funds to go there, and would catch them all and make them first-water citizens and Christians, must be a wilder enthusiast than has ever yet entered the walls of Bedlam or St. Luke’s. My Lord, there never was a greater hoax than this Sydenham speculation; and the arguments used in its favour, show us what sanctimonious fanatics some men will stoop to be if gain can be won by pretended philanthropy and godliness.
But it is added, that we are to usemoralmeans to win the masses; and we reply that we propose to employ no other. We view the Sabbath in its two aspects as a civil and a religious institution—as a physical and a spiritual boon to mankind; and we do not wish that the legislature should enact one law respecting the religious observance of the day; we only ask the Government to fulfil its political duty by securing to the labourer that exemption from toil which would injure his health, and of which wicked men would rob him if the civil power did not interfere. We are not so foolish as to suppose that mere rest from labour is religion or holiness to the Lord; but we do believe that the rest is necessary for instruction in holiness; and therefore we say to the State, You do your duty and protect the labourer from toil, and then let the Church use all proper moral means to influence him to spend his Sabbath in such a manner as shall conduce to his intellectual, moral, and eternal welfare. But our ultra liberals, after becoming quite angry and calling us a number of ugly names, exclaim, “We depend on the omnipotence of moral means”; and then turn around to a host of sharpers and say, “You may depend upon our utmost aid in enabling you to keep these poor fellows from ever having the least chance of coming within the reach of these moral means! Work the slaves as much as you like, work them seven days a week, we will see that no legislative enactment shall secure them from being slain by labour, or give them leisure to come to the house of God”! How infidels, atheists, the speculators in the nerves and muscles of their fellow man, and all who view the operative as a mere beast of burden, exult as they thus behold religious liberty voluntarily stooping to minister at the altar of Mammon, and victimize the working classes; boasting of moral force, and labouring hard to put the people beyond the reach of its power!
It is said, “The rich break the Sabbath, and that many professing Christians pay little attention to its sacred dictates”;ergo, the poor man must be robbed of his day of rest! This, my Lord, is the logic of your friends, as though doubling or trebling a crime could consecrate it. Every Sabbath breaker, whether monarch, lord, priest, or pretended saint, is really and truly a Sabbath breaker, and therefore is no Christian; and as a thousand thefts or murders cannot sanctify one, so thousands or millions of acts of Sabbath desecration cannot alter God’s law or man’s physical constitution. There stands the law engraved on man’s muscles, nerves, and brain; and written also by the same Divine Physiologist and Lawgiver in the sacred volume: “Remember the day of rest”—“in it thou shalt do no mannerof work,” &c., are the words; and woe be to him who dares break this “commandment, or teach men to do so.”
I was surprised to read in several newspapers the reasons which you, my Lord, assigned for granting a charter for this Sabbath cruelty. You stated that you wished to open the Palace for “theHEALTH,COMFORT, andMORALSof the people.” I confess that I hardly believed my own eyes, and I perused several reports of your speech before I gave them credit. But let us examine them a little.
I. Sabbath desecration for “the health of the people”: that is, you propose to shorten the lives of one class of men, for the supposed health of others! This is not very humane. And then, Sabbath desecration injures rather than promotes health. This was shown long since in the Parliamentary evidence on the observance of the Sabbath. Masters who employ large bodies of men, know full well how to distinguish the workman who spends his Sabbath in a moral and religious manner, from those who pass it in tea gardens, travelling, and dissipation. The latter are said to be frequently “not worth their salt” on a Monday; while the former are healthy, strong, and vigorous for labour, showing that the Sabbath has had its intended refreshing, re-creating, and quickening influence on their bodies, minds, and morals. There is plenty of Sabbath amusement in Paris and on the Continent; but then many of these poor creatures are half dead on the morrow, and require a Saint Monday to restore them. The bills of mortality also of London, for many years past, without a Crystal Palace, will bear comparison with any of the great cities abroad. And if, my Lord, you will obtain correct statistics of the health and longevity in the metropolis or the country of those who break and of those who rigidly observe the Sabbath, you will never say another word about Sabbath desecration as necessary to health. I am quite willing to stake the whole question on the health of the Sabbath School teachers of London. With all due deference, you must allow us to believe that the Great Physiologist who made man’s body and breathed into it an immortal soul, was not inattentive to our health and life, when he gave the Fourth Commandment; and certainly viewed the human family with as much tenderness as the Earl of Derby.
II. Sabbath desecration for “the comfort of the people.” Of course, my Lord, you intended to omit the comfort of the men and their wives and families who are to be employed in the Sydenham speculation. These poor creatures will have little comfort on the Sabbath. The father will be at work and the family will be at home bereft of its best friend. And then as to the others, who are to be amused and comforted, I am prepared to show that the families of those who keep the Sabbath are ten thousand times more comfortable than of those who break it. Let the homes of the working men in England who observe the Lord’s-day, be examined in connection withthe homes of labourers and artisans on the continent, and we do not fear what will be the result of such an investigation even in this single matter of comfort. Yes, and let Spitalfields be scrutinized, and a fair report be given of the condition of those who keep, and of those who break the Sabbath, and, my Lord, the comparison will most triumphantly prove that there can be a far higher degree of comfort enjoyed from religion than any Crystal Palace can yield. There are hundreds of happy families in Spitalfields and elsewhere, who are happy because they are pious and keep the Lord’s-day holy. To them the Sabbath is a foretaste and earnest of heaven. When the morning of the day of rest dawns, they hail it with the words of Newton,
“How welcome to the saint, when pressedWith six days’ care and pain and toil,Is the reviving day of rest,Which hides him from the world awhile!”
“How welcome to the saint, when pressedWith six days’ care and pain and toil,Is the reviving day of rest,Which hides him from the world awhile!”
Or else they sing, with Watts,
“Welcome, sweet day of rest,That saw the Lord arise,Welcome to this reviving breastAnd these rejoicing eyes”!!!
“Welcome, sweet day of rest,That saw the Lord arise,Welcome to this reviving breastAnd these rejoicing eyes”!!!
Among these poor people you will find some of the happiest persons upon the face of the globe, and in their homes ten times more comfort than is enjoyed by their Sabbath breaking neighbours who have better wages. Keeping the Sabbath aright invariably leads to domestic comfort and happiness; while breaking it, as certainly produces misery; and therefore, my Lord, it was bad domestic, bad political economy; bad physiology, bad morality and divinity to talk of increasing the comforts of the people by Sabbath dissipation. All history, all statistics, all observation, all nations, all Scripture are against your proposition.
III. Sabbath desecration for “The Morality of the People!!” This, my Lord, is certainly the climax of all. We used to be sent to the “Newgate Calendar,” and were told that Sabbath breaking led to all sorts of vice, but now the tables are turned, and working on the Sabbath and the neglect of divine worship and religious instruction are to bring the Millennium! You have been, my Lord, in France and especially in Paris on the Sabbath. There they have all sorts of pleasure gardens, costly trees and shrubs, museums, picture galleries, crystal fountains, &c., &c., open to all the public without a fee on the Sabbath. The Palais Royal; the Palace of Vendôme; the Palace of the Tuileries, and its gardens; and the Champs Elysées, with its splendid walks, will perhaps bear comparison with anything we shall have at Sydenham; and I certainly never expect to see any exhibition in this country that will vie with the palaces, waterworks, and illuminations at Versailles and St. Cloud. These, my Lord, have been for years thrown open to the people. France from time immemorial has been renowned for its popular amusements and Sunday sights and recreations, and yet these did not save the nation from “Sans Culottism,”“The Reign of Terror,” and all sorts of mad revolutions. With all these grand sights and the morality of Sabbath breaking, the French and the Continentals cannot be trusted with scarcely a particle of liberty, but must be kept in order with the bayonet; while your own immoral countrymen, who are in danger of becoming savages without a Crystal Palace, know so well how to take care of themselves that you trusted the Crystal Palace in their hands without a single soldier to protect it. With these facts before us, it sounds rather strange to hear your Lordship talk of improving the morality of the people by Sabbath desecration, when it is as clear as any fact of the present time that we owe our morality, our national contentment, security, progress, and preeminence, to our observance of the Lord’s-day. Do away with the Sabbath, my Lord, and Sans Culottism may yet reign in England, even though the Sydenham Palace may very far surpass Versailles and St. Cloud.
But if Crystal Palaces have such virtue that a visit once or twice a year to its gardens will make the vilest of the people moral, I am thinking, my Lord, that some will begin to imagine that we may soon dispense with archbishops, bishops, deans, and all the other expensive apparatus of a State Establishment. We may be sure that not one in ten of those who go to Sydenham will think of going to church before they start on the railway. Indeed, many argue that the Palace is to be opened to moralize and spiritualize those who will not at the present time enter our churches or chapels. And this said Sydenham is to perform such marvels in virtue and piety as Joanna Southcott and Mormonites never ventured even in their wildest flights to anticipate. And if so, why not plant gardens, construct fountains, and erect Crystal Palaces generally? Many of the clergy and dissenting ministers we are told have miserable congregations at present: why not make them porters and waiters at Sydenham, seeing railway men, it is supposed, will produce more morality in a few hours than some of your clergy and dissenting ministers can call forth in many years? And if the plan will work so well in the afternoon, why not have it in the morning? and then there will be no need of mocking the Almighty by praying for grace to keep the Fourth Commandment at the moment that we intend to trample it under our feet. Depend upon it, my Lord, there are not a few who will conclude that under such a moral and religious dispensation as that which the Crystal Palace adventurers have proposed to bring in, the property of the Church may go to pay off the national debt.
I may have seemed to treat this matter with levity, but was it possible to discuss such arguments with seriousness? to talk of gardens, &c., producing morality, when history shows us what architecture, pleasure grounds, and such like inventions did for Egypt, Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, and other countries, who with all these incentives to piety became the victims of their own vices? But I will not enlarge except to say that you cannot, my Lord, follow a better guide than the Bible, nor confer a greater boon on the nation than to preserve its Sabbaths from being violated by labour. I have nowbeen nearly thirty years at Ebley, and during that time have preached to a large congregation, most of them poor people, and have had ample opportunity of seeing the effects of Sabbath breaking and Sabbath observance. I am told that our chapel and schools, as seen from the Great Western Railway, look like a little paradise, and I could show your Lordship as many happy homes as perhaps any minister in any agricultural and manufacturing district in the country. I wish your Lordship would send a commissioner to look at us, for we could then prove by visible facts, that “health,” “comfort,” “morality,” intelligence and pure religion flow, and flow alone, from strict obedience to the Fourth Commandment. I had intended to say more to prove that the keeping of the seventh day is as obligatory now as in the days of Moses, but I will reserve those arguments for a separate essay, and in the meantime remain, my Lord,
Your Lordship’s obedient Servant,
B. PARSONS.
Ebley,Stroud,Gloucestershire,March10th, 1853.
P.S.—I ought, my Lord, to have added above that some persons, from this expected rage of the poor people to go to the Crystal Palace on Sundays, and its moralizing influence, will draw an argument in favour of the Voluntary Principle in religion which your Lordship has so long condemned. For if these children of destitution will pay such large sums to be educated and moralized at Sydenham, what need of State Education, tithes, or religious endowments? I should not be surprised to hear it proposed to have St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey turned into Crystal Palaces. In making these remarks I am only reasoning on the premises laid down by your Lordship, that the people would be rendered “moral” by going to the Crystal Palace on Sundays. Bishops, priests, deacons, and dissenting ministers, it is presumed, have failed; and now dram shops are to be emptied, and Spitalfields, St. Giles, and Rosemary Lane regenerated by the Sydenham grounds! Certainly, my Lord, before this new experiment is tried, it would be well to inquire, whether the Bible, Christianity, and Religious Instruction are a failure? whether Sabbath breaking will be more moralizing than Sabbath observance? whether the poor people in London will have money enough to go in shoals to Sydenham? and whether those who will really go will not be the persons who have ample time and means to go on the week?
London: Printed for John Snow, 35, Paternoster Row.