A Second Letter on the late Post Office Agitation

Transcribed from the 1850 John Murray edition by David Price
CHARLES JOHN VAUGHAN, D.D.
HEAD MASTER OF HARROW SCHOOL, AND LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET: CROSSLEY, HARROW.
MDCCCL.
LONDON: PRINTED BY W. NICOL, SHAKSPEARE PRESS, PALL MALL.
It has been satisfactory to me to receive, from many excellent and well-informed persons, assurances of their entire concurrence in the sentiments of my former Letter. I am neither surprised nor alarmed to find myself assailed, in other quarters, by loud and severe animadversions. You, Sir, have occupied an intermediate ground. You are too well aware of the particular circumstances which occasioned my letter, to accuse me of a gratuitous interference in a wearisome and unthankful controversy. Your strictures, therefore, are confined to some particular points in my argument, which you regard as requiring further elucidation. And you urge me, not so much for your own satisfaction as for that of others, to take the same opportunity of clearing away some misapprehensions to which, in the judgment of persons unacquainted with my opinions, my former Letter may have been exposed.
Half, and more than half, the arguments of my Reviewers would have been felt by themselves to be irrelevant, if they had taken the trouble to observe the circumstances under which my Letter was written. It was not to the general question of the observance of the Sunday, nor even of the extent to which it may be right that the Post Office should observe it, that my remarks were directed. The question before me was this. I am urged, as an act of religious duty, to protest against a particular Order of the Government. I am told, in the most sacred place, that a particular Regulation of the London Post Office is to be regarded no less as an affront to religion, and a violation of the rights of conscience, than as an infraction of the liberties of England. An examination of the question leads me to an opposite conclusion. I believe that the measure thus stigmatized will, so far as it extends, promote rather than impede the interests of religion, will, on the whole, facilitate rather than interfere with the attendance of that class which it concerns upon the ordinances of worship, while it leaves untouched those wider and more general considerations which would involve, if seriously and consistently entertained, a revolution in the management of the whole department. I refuse, therefore, to protest. I refuse to assert, what I see no reason to believe, that the national observance of the Lord’s Day will suffer from this particular modification of an existing system. I refuse to assert, what I think it a most unchristian malignancy to suspect, that the object of this new Regulation was that which is disavowed and repudiated by its authors. I cannot discover in it an insidious but resolute attack upon the holy ordinance of the Christian Sunday. It would have been in me an act of ridiculous affectation to express an alarm in which I did not participate; or to remonstrate against a measure of detail, by way of expressing a principle which was not at issue. So far, however, my duty was but negative. It was discharged by refusing my signature. Nor was it until I heard that refusal (which had ultimately proved sufficiently general to defeat the remonstrance altogether) commented upon afterwards, from the pulpit, in terms, to say the least, of grave disapprobation, that it ever occurred to me to vindicate myself and others from a suspicion of indifference or of timidity, by a statement of the real nature and object of the measure thus impugned.