THE CATHOLIC SUNDAY AND PURITAN SABBATH.
“Mamma, what kind of a place is heaven?” inquired a boy, after a two hours’ Sunday session in a parlor corner, with the Bible for mental aliment. “Why, my child, heaven is one perpetual Sabbath!” “Well, ma! won’t they let me go out sometimes, just to play?” Absurd as was his mode of expressing it, the boy was right as to the fundamental idea; and though he could not have given the steps by which he reached the conclusion, yet he judged well that the Almighty, when sending us into this world, did not decree that we should be perpetually miserable in it. The enforced performance of what was intended for a devotional exercise was, in his case, beginning to bear its legitimate and inevitable fruits of irksomeness at the outset, wearisomeness while it lasts, and loathsomeness at the end.
All who claim the name of Christians observe, with greater or less strictness, one day in seven as a day of rest and worship; the devotional exercises conjoined therewith, emanating from the authority of the church in the case of Catholics, and from the varying taste and fancy of the sect, congregation, or even, it would seem, of the individual, among non-Catholics. We propose in this article to inquire into the origin of the Catholic usage regarding the Sunday; the grounds and mode of its observance among Protestants; the difference between the sectarian modes of keeping it and that enjoined by the church. And as about every religious practice where variance exists there must be a right and a wrong—a method of observance consistent with authority and reason,
and one either less so or entirely incongruous therewith—we shall try to find (apart from the authority of the church, which, though ample for us, would be of little avail for outsiders) on which side right reason is, and to show the absurdity of wrong custom in the matter.
The church tells us simply what the law of nature informs us of, the existence of God the Creator, and of our duty of worshipping him; but the time when all other things must be abandoned for this special purpose is subject to another law—the ceremonial—and as under the Mosaic dispensation that law was only a shadow of future good, to be laid aside when the true Light should descend upon earth, so the Jewish Sabbath, which was clearly established in the third commandment of the Decalogue, is no longer to be held sacred, but the first day of the week, which was consecrated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost, is by her ordered to be kept holy; and she enjoins on all her children at least to hear Mass devoutly and to abstain from servile labor on that day. Having to provide, however, for all sorts and conditions of men, the church adds that reasons of necessity or transcendent charity will excuse us from either obligation. And this is all that our holy mother enjoins on the subject. As Catholics we accept and celebrate the Sunday wholly on her authority; and, à fortiori, we are not bound to any further observance of it than she dictates.
While it is clear from Holy Scripture that the apostles did meet with each other and with the early converts to Christianity twice on the Dominica or Lord’s day, yet there
is nothing to show that it was even habitual with them to convene on that day; still less is there anything, either in the form of precept or exhortation, in the entire New Testament, that would manifest the fact of any change in the ceremonial law of Moses on the subject. There is no announcement whatever either of the abrogation of the Sabbath of the Jews or of the establishment of Sunday instead; so that, had we but the Scripture to refer to, we should grope in the dark both as to the obligation itself and the mode of its fulfilment. But when we come to the fathers of the Church, the very earliest of them indicate distinctly that the Christians of their day did habitually meet together on the first day of the week (called by them κυριακὴ, or Dominica). As we go on we find them frequently enjoin, both expressly and by clear implication, the obligation resting upon all Christians of meeting together on that day for participation in the Holy Mysteries. Later still we find them affirm this duty as of apostolic institution. To give a single example of many, St. Saturninus, before suffering martyrdom at Abitina, in Africa, in the year 304, under Diocletian, for celebrating Mass on Sunday, exclaims, in presence of his judges: “The obligation of the Sunday is indispensable; it is not lawful for us to omit the duty of that day!” From the earliest Christian records to the present day there is no break, no link wanting. Historians have clearly shown the practice of the faithful, and councils have firmly enjoined and reiterated it. So much for the origin and history of Sunday worship in the Church.
It is, of course, one of the cardinal principles of Protestantism—in fact, its sole raison d’être—that “the
Bible is the only rule of faith and practice”; that everything therein commanded should be performed literally; and that whatever has no clear and direct warrant of Scripture is purely of man’s device, and, by consequence, of no authority whatsoever. All very fine, in words; but when we examine how the doctrine works in point of fact, we shall find an amazingly great discrepancy between the expressed faith and the actual, tangible practice. There has certainly been no considerable drain upon the reservoirs of our large cities in carrying out the injunction that “if ye wash not one another’s feet, ye have no part in me.” It is not, so far as we are informed, peculiarly characteristic of any sect of Protestants, when “smitten on one cheek,” immediately to “turn the other” for a repetition of the blow. No special alacrity has ever been shown, even by the straitest sects, in eager obedience to the command, “From him that borroweth from thee, turn not thou away”; and so far are they from obeying the absolute injunction of the Apostle James to “call in the priests of the church to the sick,” and to “anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord,” that they rave and rage against Catholics for doing so, and affirm it to be a superstitious observance. If St. Paul ever expressed himself clearly on any point, he certainly does so most unmistakably when he says that “it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church”; yet the sectarian world is now very largely supplied with “reverend” ladies, widowed, married, and maiden, who evangelize with great acceptance, and even officiate as regular pastors to various congregations throughout the country. It would seem, therefore, that the cardinal principle aforesaid
must have either disappeared or some ingenious mode have been discovered by which it works only when wanted, to be set aside whenever its admission would run counter to the whim which may happen to be in vogue.
Now, the only texts of the New Testament that mention the Sunday in such way that it would be possible to draw from them any inference in regard to its observance are Acts xx. 7 and 1 Cor. xiv.. 1, neither of which declares the abolition of the ancient Sabbath or enjoins the observance of Sunday. But notwithstanding this fact, Protestants at large have accepted our Sunday, whether on tradition, which they reject; or on the authority of the church, which they despise; or, finally, of their own good pleasure—certainly not on Scripture, since it is not instituted therein. It is hardly worth while, owing to their paucity, to mention as exceptions the Sabbatarians, who maintain that Christians have no authorization for changing the divine institution of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently observe Saturday. Luther does not pretend any divine authority for the change, but takes for granted that “mankind needs a rest of one day, at least, in seven; and the first day, or Sunday, having prescription in its favor, ought not lightly to be changed.” He says elsewhere that “if any man sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to labor on it, to ride or dance on it, or to do anything whatever on it that shall remove its infringements on Christian liberty.” The Augsburg Confession pointedly says: “Those who judge that in place of the Sabbath the Lord’s day was instituted, as a day necessarily to be observed, do very grossly err.” Calvin says in
his Institutes: “It matters not what day we celebrate, so that we meet together for the desirable weekly worship; there is no absolute precept”; and he adds that the sticklers for Sunday are “thrice worse in their crass and carnal view of religion than the Jews whom Isaias (ch. i. 13) denounced.” The doctrine of the English Reformers on the subject is most concisely and strikingly put by Tyndale, who, in his Answer to Sir Thomas More, thus speaks:
“As for the Sabbath, we be lords over the Sabbath, and may yet change it into Monday, or into any other day, ass we see need, or may make every tenth day holy day, only ass we see cause why. We may make two every week, if it were expedient and one not enough to teach the people. Neither was there any cause to change it from Saturday, but to put a difference between ourselves and the Jews; neither need we any holy day at all, if the people might be taught without it.”
Even in Scotland John Knox, who attached himself to the innovators with a bigoted zeal, did not pretend to find any Gospel warrant for what he was pleased to call the Sabbath; and Dr. Hessey candidly acknowledges that the strained sabbatarianism of Scotland is by no means to be attributed to him or his coadjutors, mentioning at the same time that Knox, when on a visit to Calvin at Geneva, found that eminent Reformer occupied, on the Sunday of his arrival, at a game of bowls! If, then, it be plain that the arch-innovators are not responsible for that peculiarly unlovely, rigid, and ultra-Judaic observance of the Sunday (the traces of which, growing fainter year by year, are yet plainly discernible in the laws, institutions, habits, and manners of the English-speaking portion of the Protestant world), whence did
it originate? Why are the ideas of English-speaking Protestants so widely different from those of their brethren, and even of their own founders, on this subject?
Fuller (in whose pages much quaint and naïve information about the history of those transition days is to be found) tells us that the Puritans, “who first began to be called by that name about 1564,” and who dissented from the church of King Henry on the ground that the Reformation had not gone “far enough,” were, like all other renegades, anxious to distinguish themselves by hostility at every point to the camp they had abandoned. They preached that to throw bowls on the Sabbath “were as great sin as to kill a man”; to make a feast or wedding dinner on that day “were as vile sin as for a father to cut the throat of his son with a knife”; and that to ring more bells than one “were mickle sin as is murder.” Of this brood was Vincent Bownde, whose great work on the Observance of the Sabbath first appeared in 1595; and to this book, which began the polemical controversy on the subject, is due the rabid sabbatarianism of the English Puritans during the remainder of the reign of Elizabeth and the dynasty of the Stuarts. The Scottish Calvinists eagerly seized the cry, and from both sects (their influence, pertinacity, and numbers being much greater than those of the Anglican Establishment, which was itself, of necessity, largely tinctured by their practice), through our own hard-headed but harder-hearted Puritans of New England, who practised this unmitigating observance of the day with the same zeal of enforcement that they displayed in many other grimly ludicrous things, we of this age and
country are still to a great extent under the sway of an intolerant and enforced sabbatarianism which the spread of intelligence and liberality is gradually wearing away, but which, after all, dies very hard. Just as no enmity is so envenomed, no hatred so intense, so in like manner no distinctive practice or usage disappears so slowly, as those originally engendered by religious faction. It was clear that no Scriptural authority existed for the abrogation of the Jewish Sabbath, and equally evident that the denial of the authority of the church destroyed for ever all ecclesiastical sanction for Sunday. There remained, consequently, no possible authorization for it but to insist that the mere meeting together of the apostles on that day (which, so far as anything to the contrary can be shown from Scripture, might have been accidental) constituted sufficient warrant; and next to regulate the observance of the day by the practice of the Jews with regard to the Sabbath. This Bownde did without hesitation. His book, gratifying as it did at once the malignity of the Puritans against the church, their envy of the established sect, and their own exclusiveness, became exceedingly popular, was largely read and quoted, and its influence remains to the present day. Here in the United States we yet retain traces of it in our laws; as, indeed, we still do of that other intolerance by which Catholics were, in former days, not allowed to hold civil office. In some of the New England States Sunday (or Sabbath, as they wrong-headedly insist on calling it) begins at sunset on Saturday; but in most of them it legally begins at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, lasting twenty-four hours. In some States contracts made on that day are
void; but generally they are binding, if good in other respects. Of course the name Sunday is the Anglo-Saxon Sunnan-dœg, equivalent to the Roman dies solis, so called in both tongues from its being anciently devoted to the worship of the sun. Sabbath is the Hebrew noun shabbāth (rest) from the verb shābath (to rest).
To ourselves and those who think with us that the state, in legislating about matters of religion, whether doctrinal or merely of exterior observance, is overstepping her proper limits—nay, who go further, and insist that government was no more instituted to educate our children than to feed and clothe them; that there is not an assignable ground for the former which would not be even more conclusive for the latter—it follows that all such legislation, from that of Cromwell’s Puritans and the Six Sessions of Scotland, down through the Blue Laws of Connecticut, to the last municipal regulation that allows no concert on Sunday unless it be a “sacred” one, and no procession accompanied by a band of music on that day, seems, what it really is, an absurdity and a monstrosity, a relic of odious strifes and bitter hates; and we would be glad, in common, we think, with sensible and tolerant men of all creeds, to see our statute-books rid of its remotest traces.
In speaking of any religious practice enjoined by the Catholic Church we have this advantage: viz., that what it is at one place or time it is in all places and at all times. The practice, then, of Catholics, in accordance with the church teachings above stated, is to hear Mass on Sunday, and, except in cases of necessity, to abstain from servile labor. Most Catholics also attend Vespers on that day, though
there be no absolute obligation. We take no extreme cases, either of the very pious on the one side who for their souls’ sake may be said to make a Sunday of every day in the week, or of those on the other hand whose religion sits so lightly upon them that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether, beyond a feeble claim to the name of Catholic, they have any religion at all. Among the 200,000,000 Catholics of the world are to be found many of both descriptions. We speak, however, of the average. Among these, Mass and Vespers being over, there will be found no strait-lacedness; no tone peculiar to a Sunday, put on for that day, and not observable on other days; no hesitation in conversing about sublunary affairs of all kinds that can and may engage the attention during the week. Should a concert-hall be open, as in Europe is often the case, the Catholic hesitates not to go there, providing it be one to which he would go on any day—i.e., if it be a proper place for himself or family under any circumstances. He converses on business or for pleasure with his friends in the public gardens, at the cafés; with his family he visits other families with whom they may be intimate. He does not hesitate to write a business letter, to view a lot which he thinks of purchasing, or to take the railway train on that day. It is needless to go further. He has complied with the command of the church, and, not being a law unto himself spiritually, he invents for himself no obligations superadded to those of the church, which, in accordance with the commands of Scripture, he believes himself bound to hear.
In speaking of Protestant doctrine or practice we are, of course,
more at a loss to speak definitely than when we lay down Catholic usage; since the former rarely remains the same on any single point, even within the same sect, for an ordinary generation of man. Why, fifty years ago Christmas was an abomination, “a rag of popery,” to all but the Anglicans. The sign of the cross was “the mark of the beast.” An organ in a meeting-house was “a seeking out of their own inventions.” Of the least approach to a liturgical observance, were it but the repetition of the Creed, it was said: “In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” Now nearly all the sects make a feint of some sort of service or observance of the Christmas season; the cross is displayed within and without many church buildings; not merely organs but string and brass bands fill the choirs of Protestant fashionable churches; they may nearly all be heard falsely repeat, Sunday after Sunday, that they “believe in the holy Catholic Church”; and the prophet who should now foretell their changes in another half-century would run the risk of being mobbed in the public streets.
We give the doctrinal teaching of the Presbyterians on Sunday and its observance, or at least of so many of the different religious bodies going under that name as still subscribe to, and say they deduce their doctrines from the Bible via the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was formerly, and is to some extent still, the most generally received teaching on the subject of observing the Sabbath among English-speaking Protestants, who seem to have had a monopoly of spiritual information and an exclusive enlightenment on this whole matter. How much the bitter hatred
existing between Roundhead and Cavalier had to do with the firm hold the said observance took on Puritans and their descendants is not to the present purpose to inquire. In response to the question, “How is the Sabbath to be sanctified?” we have this answer:
“The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in public and private exercises of God’s worship, except so much as may be taken up in works of necessity and mercy.”
What was meant by this is sufficiently indicated by the legislation effected both before and subsequent to the meeting of the “Assembly of Divines.” We are assured by excellent authorities that in England, some twenty years after the appearance of Bownde’s book, people “dared not, for fear of breaking the Sabbath, kindle a fire, or dress meat, or visit their neighbors; nor sit at their own door nor walk abroad; nor even talk with each other, save and it were of godly matters.” In 1643 the Long Parliament enacted laws “for the more thorough observance of the Sabbath,” and caused to be burnt by the hangman James I.’s Book of Sports. In the next year the Court of Six Sessions forbade in Scotland all walking in the streets on the Sabbath after the noonday sermon; and soldiers patrolled the streets, arresting both old and young whom they should find outside their houses and not on the way to or from church. The gates of Edinburgh were ordered to be shut from ten P.M. of Saturday till four A.M. of Monday; and the case is on record of a widow who had to pay a fine of
two merks for having “had a roast at the fire during sermon time.”
It is told of an English lady of rank in our own day that, having procured some Dorking fowl, she some time after asked the servant who attended to them whether they were laying many eggs; to which the latter replied with great earnestness: “Indeed, my lady, they lay every day, not excepting even the blessed Sabbath!” Nor is the puritanic feeling still existing to a considerable extent among some few of the sectaries in Scotland badly illustrated by Sandie’s remark when he saw a hare skipping along the road as the people were gathering for sermon: “Ay! yon beast kens weel eneuch it’s the Sabbath day!” And the countryman passing on his way to “meeting,” who, when asked by a tourist the name of a picturesque ruin in the vicinity, answered: “It’s no the day to be speerin’ sic like things,” gives the reader an idea of certain peculiarities (formerly quite prevalent among Protestants, and still too common for the comfort of those who have many of the straiter sort for neighbors) which, we believe, are gradually but surely fading out before the progress of intelligence and with the wave of superstition and intolerance. For it must be borne in mind that the same Westminster Confession, relying too on Scripture, insists on the right and power of the civil magistrate circa sacra, contends that “he beareth not the sword in vain,” and that kings should be “nursing fathers” and queens “nursing mothers” to the church. We will do our modern Presbyterians the charity to believe that in subscribing to this instrument, they do so with some “mental reservation”; otherwise the cry against union of church and state
that we so frequently hear from them would (when taken in connection with their former antecedents as a sect and their present professed standards) be quite unintelligible.
Now, of the mode of keeping Sunday followed by Protestants in Continental Europe we need not speak, nor of the practice of Anglicans in the same regard, save in so far as the latter have (principally through the lower or evangelical division of their body) been modified and influenced by its former subjection and present proximity to the Puritan element of the English population. In the countries of Europe claimed as Protestant, and as a very natural as well as logical result of the indifferentism taught by the so-called fathers of reform, Luther and Calvin, it is difficult for the tourist to discern in Prussia, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, save by the greater number of people at the theatres, concerts, and exhibitions, in the beer-gardens, taverns, and other places of resort, whether the day be Sunday or not. Some, of course, attend church on that day, it being almost the only day of the week on which such service is ever held. Geneva and the non-Catholic cantons of Switzerland may be passed with the same description, which completely exhausts Protestant Continental territory in Europe. Nor of the mode of observing Sunday inculcated by the Anglicans in England can we say that it is at all overdone or puritanical. They have, at least, escaped the dismal parody of asceticism which distinguishes such of their Scotch neighbors as have any trace of the ancient practice left.[152] Let us
glance a moment at the laws of our Puritan friends of New England, that we may get an idea of bigotry run mad, and of the deductions that may be drawn from Vincent Bownde’s book and the teachings of the Westminster divines. “Having themselves,” as Washington Irving well observes,” served a regular apprenticeship in the school of persecution, it behoved them to show that they were proficients in the art.” The Puritans of Massachusetts thus legislate in regard to the “Sabbath” in the “Plymouth Code”:
“This court, taking notice of the great abuse and many misdemeanors committed by divers persons profaning the Sabbath, or Lord’s day, to the great dishonor of God, reproach of religion, and grief of spirit of God’s people, do therefore order that whosoever shall profane the Lord’s day by doing unnecessary servile work, by unnecessary travelling, or by sports or recreations, he or they that so trespass shall forfeit, for every such default, forty shillings, or be publicly whipped; but if it clearly appear that the sin was proudly, presumptuously, and with a high hand committed, against the known command and authority of the Blessed God, such a person, therein despising and reproaching the Lord, SHALL BE PUT TO DEATH, or grievously punished, at the discretion of the court.”
In support of the same wretched Sabbath superstition the colonies of Hartford and New Haven issue the following edicts:
21. “No one shall run on the Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting.”
22. “No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave on the Sabbath day.”
23. “No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.”
Omitting, for very shame’s sake, to say anything of No. 38 of Governor Eaton’s code, the reader will perceive in the above quotations to what absurd results logical consistency drives the fanatic when he becomes so by cutting adrift from the safe moorings of God’s church and trusts his salvation to the puny cockboat of private judgment. These Puritans had disclaimed the title of the church which originated the Sunday; they would not, like Cranmer, accept it as “a mere appointment of the magistrates”; so there was nothing left for them but to slur over the utter vagueness of its mention in the New Testament, and refer the whole observance back to Moses and the Third Commandment. In doing this why were they not consistent throughout? Why did they not let their lands rest in the seventh year? Why not observe the year of Jubilee ordered by the sanction of the same Lawgiver?
As before stated, Protestant practice, like the doctrines from which it emanates, is Proteus-like in form and phase; nor is the method followed in the observance of Sunday any exception to the general rule. But, upon the whole, the offspring of Knox, the descendants of Bownde, and the adherents of the straiter sects stand up more strenuously and make a stouter fight (not in argument, but by sheer persistence) for the rigorous keeping of the “Sabbath” than they have found it convenient to do for many doctrines and usages which, logically speaking, were of far more importance to Protestantism as a system. Our outward and visible life in the United States, in Canada, and in the British Isles is to this day, in this one matter, largely tinctured and deeply
infected with the plague of stupid and superstitious keeping of the Sunday, begun in factious opposition to the English state establishment, propagated by the work of Bownde, eagerly appropriated by Andrew Melville and the Scottish politico-religious agitators of his day, and transmitted to us through the Rump Parliament and the Puritans of New England. The “able and godly” ministers of these latter, who, in the words of Mr. Oliver, “derided the sign of the cross, but saw magic in a broomstick,” though their descendants have recoiled from the teachings of their childhood into Unitarianism or infidelity; though not one-half the adult population of New England now belongs to any Christian sect; and though of all bodies of men that ever existed under a guise of religion in the face of day they were the most inconsistent, the most bigoted, the most superstitious, the most intolerant, and the most relentlessly persecuting, are yet often forced upon our admiration. It has somehow become the fashion to laud these bigots to the heavens in annual palavers of New England Societies, Plymouth Rock orators, Fourth of July and other spread-eagle speakers; and though their other doctrines and practices have vanished, leaving on their chosen ground scarce a trace behind, yet we are reminded of their spirit and quondam influence by the shackles of legal enactment in regard to Sunday observance; by the tumult that rises from certain classes of Protestants as silent custom or outspoken enactment from time to time sweeps out of existence some one or other of the trammels with which Puritanism, in its day of power, enthralled us.
With what persistent zeal do they not agitate in the newspapers and petition authorities, municipal, State, and federal, against the running of the horse-cars, the rail-cars, and the mail steamers on the Sabbath! How terrible, in their eyes, are the Sunday excursions of the laboring people of our large cities! How clearly do they not perceive that liberty is a good thing only so long as everybody thinks and acts exactly as they do! Did they not prove that we lost the day on a famous occasion during the civil war by delivering battle on Sunday? How insanely anxious are they not to have the Almighty (their Almighty, that is to say) in some way constitutionally harnessed to the already hard-racked instrument which consolidates the government of these States! It is true that these men are the têtes montées of fanaticism of this sort, and we are far from affirming that a majority of their co-religionists go with them. Indeed, we know, from daily observation, that in many of the sects there exists but little of the spirit indicated, and that what remains is fast disappearing. But there exists enough of the embers to render walking amid them very annoying, and, with the assistance of a good breeze from the preachers, these embers may easily, and on small provocation, be fanned into a flame! Has not fanaticism displayed an unexpected vigor in connection with the question of opening our great Centennial Exposition on the only day on which the industrious poor can have the chance of seeing it without manifest injury to their temporal interests?
Our Protestant friend of the stricter sort awakes on the Sunday morning, bethinks himself of the
day, dresses (having shaved himself provisorily on Saturday night), schools his countenance into the most malignantly orthodox cast, takes in hand the Bible, Baxter’s Call, or Boston’s Fourfold State, and descends to the parlor; that is, he would descend but that he hears one of his boys whistling in an adjoining room, who must at once be reproved therefor, to be more fully punished next day.
“To Banbury came I, O profane one!
There I saw a Puritane one
Hanging of his cat on Monday
For killing of a rat on Sunday.”
Having thus effectually “borne testimony” and quenched the spirits of the juvenile members of the family, who, fully knowing what Sunday means to them, have learned experimentally that
“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,”
he sits down gazing at his book, fancying, in some vague way, that he is doing God service (though how or to what end would seem indistinct, since, according to his most cherished doctrine, there is no merit whatever in good works). He hears with disgust the bell of the irreligious milkman, sees the unsanctified horse-car pass his door, the irreverent baker make his round, and notes the profane newsboy cry the Sunday papers. This last is the most afflictive dispensation of all, and the one against which he has most vainly and frequently petitioned, never thinking that, even on his own grounds, the real gravamen is in the papers of Monday morning, the work for which must necessarily be done on Sunday. Breakfast comes at length—eaten in solemn silence—the children being “hard up” for an apposite moral or religious observation, and fearful lest, should they
say anything, it might be something mundane. Nor can the mother help them to diminish the gloom of the occasion, having been herself furtively engaged in eking out the shortcomings of the servant in preparing the meal, and painfully aware that, according to the family scheme of orthodoxy, she has not been sanctifying the Sabbath. Family worship (on this day longer in the prayer than usual) adds in no way to the general cheerfulness. Each boy and girl, supplied with a Sunday-school book of the stereotyped pattern and contents, and given to understand the enormity of even the desire to take a walk on that day, longs in the inmost heart that the day were over. Church time comes, when, with a warning that they will be expected to answer on the text, the sermon, and an admonition against drowsiness, all are trooped off to meeting, the parents bringing up the rear. Then ensues an hour and a half of dreary listening to what most of them cannot, by the remotest possibility, comprehend. More than likely some of them may have been overcome by sleep; in which case even the negative pleasure of apathy is taken away, and its place supplied by a fearful looking-for of judgment, either by rebuke or castigation. The dinner is, in want of hilarity, a repetition of the breakfast; for no secular idea may be expressed, and the spirit does not move the younger branches, in any special degree, to an interest in the rather languid remarks of the paterfamilias upon the theological tendencies of the sermon; said observations being delivered in his Sunday tone, compared with which a gush of tears would be exhilarating. Books are retaken; no cheerful game or romp among the children;
no free play or interchange of ideas between the parents. To write a letter would be a crying sin for the father. It is a heinous fault when his mind spontaneously wanders to that note of his due on Wednesday next; and although the mother had the interesting and enlivening lucubrations of Edwards on the Will in her hands, yet there is much reason to believe that the washing of to-morrow has more than once intervened to prove Edwards in the right; not to mention the occasion on which she caught herself recalling the trimmings of Mrs. X—‘s bonnet in the front pew. No visit from, none to, any family of their acquaintance; either would be a sin against the sanctity of the Sabbath! We need not visit the Sunday-school, to which the superstitious folly of the parents, fear of their fellow church-members, the Mrs. Grundyism of sects, or an unfounded belief that something valuable is learned there compels the parents to send their children. Probably most of our readers know how these things are managed; what is the causa causativa of a Sunday-school superintendent; what is the calibre of the young men who teach, and the object which takes them there. We all, of course, know and recognize the high moral aims as well as the literary and theological ability of the misses who form the grand staff of instructors in those institutions! But we must not be diverted from our sabbatarian Sunday.
Then follows a dreary tea, meeting and sermonizing again, from which two of the children, having gone hopelessly asleep soon after the exordium, are brought home in a dazed state, nor does a protracted bout of family worship much assist in arousing them therefrom; and then to bed! We suppose the father
to be honest. Many such men are. We doubt not but many of the Puritans were sincere, and slit the ears of the Quakers with the serenity of good men engaged in the performance of a virtuous action. But let us put the question squarely to reasonable men: Will it be a matter of surprise if this man’s children, when they grow up, loathe and abhor all religion, thinking it all of a piece with that in which they were brought up—if they turn out, in short, what the descendants of the Puritans have become? Why, the writer is acquainted with a school, kept by a well-meaning man, in which, by tedious Bible-reading, hymn-singing, and long-winded prayers at the school opening and closing, the teacher is unwittingly the cause of more of what he would consider sacrilege, in an hour, than is heard of profanity among all the hackmen of New York on the longest day of the year; and his great object, which is to bring up Presbyterians, is thereby rendered as utterly futile as though he were an ingenious man doing his utmost to make infidels of them.
Curiously enough, people of this kind (we refer to the strict keeping of Sunday) are never satisfied with the liberty they enjoy (and which nobody wishes to curtail) of observing the day just as rigorously as they may desire. Not at all. There is no happiness or ease of spirit for them until by legal pains and penalties they can force you, me, and all their neighbors to their own peculiar way of thinking and acting. This was well illustrated by the Scotchman who, in telling how pious a people he had got among, said: “Last Sabbath, joost as the kirk was skailin’, there was a drover chiel comin’ alang the road,
whustlin’ an’ lookin’ as happy as gin it was the middle o’ the week. Weel, sir, oor lads is a God-fearin’ set o’ lads, an’ they wur joost comin’ oot o’ kirk. Od! they yokit on him, an’ amaist kilt him.” This is, after all, the point of the matter. We neither can, by right, ought to have, nor have we any objection to any observance of the Sunday, however rigid or however much (to our mind) it may seem strained, overdone, and even ludicrous. That is the affair of the man himself, and should lie between his own conscience and his Creator, where we have no right to interfere. But we all want and have a right to the same privilege for own conviction, or want of conviction, that we cheerfully accord to him. Now, this such people as he never will accord to us so long as they can possibly prevent it. They never have done so in the history of the world, and, taking experience for our guide, we have no reason to suppose that they ever will. They prate largely of liberty of conscience, but that phrase means in their mouth liberty to think as you please, so long as you think with them. Though he is my neighbor, may not my daughter play the piano on Sunday on account of his tender conscience? Must I not, because he fancies the Sunday thereby desecrated, practise the flute? I do not attempt to interfere with his drone of family worship; why should he be eternally petitioning to stop the delivery of my letters, or to prevent my going down-town in the horse-cars on that day? I insist that he has as much as he is called on to do in attending to the affairs of his own conscience; that the contract is quite as much as he can conveniently and creditably get through with
and I object (I think with reason) to giving up mine to his charge. I want a keg of beer in my cellar, or, it may be, a basket of champagne. Because he is virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale? Shall his being scandalized because I think proper to take a walk on Sunday confine me all that day to the house? Must his scruples of conscience prevent myself and family from entertaining our friends on Sunday? In short, must I always be on tenterhooks to know how his conscience regards every act of mine on that day? It would seem, though, as if that were just what my neighbor and his atrabilious friends have been aiming at. For, now that I think of it, they have been since ever I remember the self-same people, who have all along got up meetings, been active in urging petitions, and done their utmost to thwart every convenience or facility that for the past twenty-five years has been contrived for public accommodation on Sunday.
On further reflection, they are the identical individuals who have publicly and privately been marplots in every matter in our vicinage, during the same length of time, which did not fully recognize their little Ebenezer or Bethel as its fount and origin; and though they are possibly not to be convinced, yet it is highly important for these people and all their class to learn once for all that the days of Puritanism are gone, and that nowadays every man is responsible for his own acts to his Creator, and not to Mr. Jones next door, nor to the congregation with which he worships. We do not wish Mr. J—— to read his letters on Sunday, nor will we force him to patronize the street-car on that or
any other day; but we want him and his friends to cease from making laws that interfere with our freedom, while thrusting upon them nothing which, willy nilly, they are bound to accept.
Thus it will be seen that our objection is not to our friends of the various illiberal “schemes of salvation” as individuals, nor to their practice of a peculiar and, to us, by no means an alluring primness of speech and gait on Sunday; but to their unwillingness to allow us, who see things differently, to follow our own convictions, and to their manifest determination that we shall, in the event of their ever having the power, be forced to adapt ourselves to their views and practices. This overbearing spirit seems to be inseparable from their pharisaic practice and its resultant prejudices, so that our dislike to both is well founded. As to the sanctification of the Lord’s day, they have an indisputable right to celebrate it just as austerely as may best suit them, though we think them grossly and foolishly wrong therein. They may call the day Sabbath, if they please, though we know that word to signify Saturday, and nothing else. But in return for this (not concession, for it is their right) we wish to suggest mildly that we also have certain inalienable rights; that among these, according to a highly-respectable and much-lauded document of which we sometimes hear, “are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and we modestly venture the additional suggestion that the municipal and other laws which already exist, and those which these people would fain enact, touching an enforced observance of the Sunday after their fashion, interfere largely with our just liberty and militate strongly against
our chances of success in the pursuit of happiness.
Finally, which method of observing the day seems the more in accord with right reason? And here we wish the Protestant to lay aside a moment, if he can, the prejudice engendered by the tyranny of early education, surrounding usage, and personal habit. Our having been accustomed from early youth to a specific article of diet, clothing, or to a habit of any kind, physical or mental, does not necessarily make an entirely different usage wrong or the direct reverse sinful. If it be a command of God that Sunday shall be observed after the fashion of the ancient Jews with their Sabbath, we have nothing to say, except that even then we object to its observance being made a matter of legal enactment. No man was ever yet driven to the Almighty by fear of temporal pains and penalties; nor is any worship acceptable to our Creator unless it be a free-will offering of the heart. But when Protestants admit with us that the Mosaic dispensation is past and the type done away with in the fulness of that which it prefigured, we certainly cannot consider the law of the Pentateuch any more binding upon us in this respect than in regard to the rite of circumcision, the usage of polygamy, or the obligation of a brother to marry his deceased brother’s wife. But there is, in the New Testament, no warrant at all for the change of the day, much less any rule for its special observance; and consequently, on Protestant principles, any day in the week—indeed, any one in ten days, a fortnight, or a month—would answer the purposes of religion equally well; and as there is no Scriptural command, the mode of
observance is purely of human invention.
We of course do not speak here of the Sunday, or of any one day in seven, employed (apart from religious purposes) solely for the purpose of recruiting the jaded physical energies of him who toils on the other six days in the week. The necessity for a periodical suspension of toil and labor depends on physical laws to which no reference is now made; and as the turmoil of trade and the competition of labor go on increasing, the necessity for the regular recurrence of a day of rest becomes more and more evident. The laboring classes are too numerous and too deeply interested in the preservation of the stated holiday for it ever to die out. In this view of the question—the purely physical one—the mode of observance would be simply a matter of discretion and utility, and would not come within the purview of the civil law at all; though the actual appointment of the day might, for the sake of uniformity and for many other reasons, very properly be considered as pertaining to government. We, however, speak of the day as a divine or an ecclesiastical institution, in which light its observance will depend upon the direct word of God or command of his church; but in no case will the civil law have any right to interfere either by dictum or permission.
But even supposing, for argument’s sake, what we by no means admit—viz., that the Sunday should be observed in accord with the prescriptions of the Pentateuch—we do not see how it follows that innocent and healthful recreation should be denied on that day, either to the young, for whom it is absolutely necessary, or to the middle-aged
and the old, to whom it is at least desirable. There is a great and palpable distinction between recreation and labor. The latter is forbidden on the Sabbath in the Decalogue; but does the former stand in the same case? The words are: “On it thou shalt not do any work.” It does not say: “On it thou shalt take no recreation, nor shalt thou play.” It is one thing to say to the hod-carrier or the navvy that he shall not mount the ladder with the heaped hod or ply the mattock and spade; and it is another and quite a different thing to say to either that he shall not take a walk in the suburbs, go with his family on an aquatic or rural excursion, or visit the “Exhibition buildings” on a Sunday. It is against such superstitious abuses, which had, in course of time, grown up on the authority of the sophistical Rabbins touching the Sabbath, that our Saviour so frequently and pointedly protests; and against the same or similar illiberal practices we now protest.
We Catholics say that the Sunday is like other holidays of obligation, of the same enactment, and on the some footing with them—i.e., they are all instituted by command of the church. Now, with the Sunday, as well as with the other church festivals of obligation, comes the duty of hearing Mass and refraining from servile labor; but the law of the church ceases at that point, and “where there is no law there is no transgression.” The Catholic believes the other days ordered by the church to be observed just as binding as Sunday; but it never enters his head to attempt to coerce Protestants either into the same belief or observance. His
Protestant friend says to him in effect: “I have a very tender conscience touching the observance of this day. Your cheerfulness interferes with my devotional feelings; your Sunday recreations, walks, visits, and travel scandalize me, and offer a bad example to my rising family. On last Sunday morning yourself and family rode out in the horse-cars to the park; in the afternoon you entertained a houseful of visitors, during which time you, with the flute, accompanied your daughter on the piano. The Sunday previous you took the train for an adjoining city. The Sunday papers are frequently taken at your house. You write, post, receive, and read letters as unconcernedly on the Lord’s day as though it were the middle of the week. When we had the power you would have been firstly fined, then whipped, and for stubborn persistence put to death for this; but in these degenerate days all I can do is to put every legal and social obstruction in your way that our decaying numbers but ever persistent determination will enable us to do. Alas for the days that are gone!”
Now, with the parents on either side we have little to do. The mind of the Catholic is made up; his conscience is informed from the precepts and instructions of the church; and we have no desire to change his views or practice in the premises. And, in the case of his opponent, there are few tasks so hopelessly wanting in results as that of convincing a man against his will; as that of trying to surmount religious prejudice in the adult. But we put it to fair reason, to common sense, to the community (which has a manifest interest that its members shall be
under the influence of some religion, and not utter infidels), to answer: In which of the two families exists the stronger likelihood that the children will grow up stanch and ardent believers in religion? Will any one tell us that it will be in that in which a dark, overshadowing pall, under the name of piety, was made “to press the life from out young hearts”; in which every thoughtless, merry, or exuberant word or act of theirs was represented as sin “deserving God’s wrath and curse for ever”; in which no memory of youth connected with religion can be other than sombre, dismal, and remorseful? Or will it be in the Catholic family, where the child is taught, not merely in words, but in fact, that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”; where, as he grows up, religious observance constantly appeals to him as a privilege, not as an infliction; where cheerfulness, mirth, and jollity are
by no means considered hostile to, but rather the concomitants of, true religion; and where no day of the week is definitely consecrated to unnatural gloom and false (because enforced, and consequently hypocritical) devotion?
The answer is plain. Statistics of the result, with children brought up under each set of influences, bear us triumphantly out; and, in fine, thankful as we are for the daily and yearly decrease in numbers and influence of those who maintain this rigorous observance of the Sunday, we shall be still better pleased, and it will be a happy day for this and the other English-speaking peoples among whom they ever existed, when the quibbling, narrow-minded, and sophistical principles and practices represented by such persons shall have been entirely stamped out beneath the onward march of tolerance and Christian charity.
[152] Not having had an opportunity of extensive travel in Scotland, we cannot speak of anything but Edinburgh and Glasgow; but on the few Sundays that we passed there, if there was any more specific and noticeable observance of the day than by more copious drinking, we failed to see it.