THE SABBATH.
I have been requested to make some statements to the Alliance in reference to the observance of the Sabbath in Scotland; and I think I shall best accomplish the task committed to me, by presenting, in as condensed a form as possible, a view of general Scottish opinion on this vital subject, some details regarding our modern Scottish experience, with notices of the principal dangers to which I believe the cause of the Sabbath in Scotland to be at this time exposed. In doing this while I shall have to confirm the impressions of many brethren in other countries, there are also some misapprehensions which I am glad to be favoured with such an opportunity of dispelling.
1. It is true, then, that our ministers and Christian people in Scotland, almost without exception, believe in the Divine authority and perpetual obligation of the Sabbath-day.—They base their respect for it, not upon any ecclesiastical appointment, however venerable, or upon any time-honoured custom, however ancient, but upon the conviction that it is a benignant and unrevoked gift of Heaven to the human race. Ask any intelligent Christian throughout Scotland, no matter to which of our evangelical denominations he belongs, on what ground he keeps holy the weekly Sabbath, and he will tell you that he does this because he believes that it was given to man in Eden—an institution not for a nation or for a limited period, but for the world and for all time,—that it was republished to the Jews from Mount Sinai, not in the midst of transient ceremonial appointments, but "enshrined amid the eternal verities of the moral law,"—and that at the resurrection of Christ, while the mere day of its observance was changed by apostolic sanction, it entered on a new course, and became linked with new associations—the memorial, from that hour, of completed redemption as well as of completed creation. And in this fact, more than in any other, we find the secret strength of our Sabbath observance. From the peculiar constitution of the Scottish mind, as well as from the social condition of Scotland, the Sabbath would not stand its ground for many years were it based upon a foundation less stable, or surrounded by a sanction less sacred than a Divine command; and I affirm with confidence, that one effect of the re-discussion of the whole question of the Sabbath, which has been forced upon its friends in Scotland during recent years, has been to make the convictions of our Christian people regarding its Divine authority more deep, more intelligent, and therefore more immovable.
2. A second distinguishing feature in the Sabbath-keeping of Scotland consists in the fact, that we consider the entire Sabbath to be specially and equally consecrated to religion.—The length of the sacred day we believe to be just the same as the length of common days. We know nothing of the distinction of "canonical hours," as if one part of the day were in any degree more hallowed than another; and all such distinctions we are accustomed to regard as a pernicious and presumptuous tampering with Divine rule, a narrowing of our charter, not indeed of inglorious idleness, but of holy rest. But while we look upon every part of the Sabbath as a dedicated thing, in the sense of our abstaining from all such secular employments and recreations as would be lawful on other days, its religious exercises are wisely and happily diversified; and in this allotment of the Sabbath's holy work, very much is left to the discretion of individuals and of churches. This statement, I believe, may do something to remove one injurious and prevalent mistake regarding our Scottish manner of keeping the Lord's day. Were I to describe a well-spent Sabbath-day, such as is spent by thousands of men in Scotland who are the salt of our land, and the life and glory of our churches—such as was spent by the best of the English Puritans two hundred years since, often leading them to confess, at the close of such a day, "Surely if this be not heaven, it must be the way to it;"—I should paint it in some such manner as the following:—The good man rises from his slumbers to realise the fact that it is God's day of sacred rest, and to open his mind to its devout associations. There is an unwonted stillness in the streets, and in the fields all around him, which that day only brings. The care of the body is not unheeded, and there is even a double attention to cleanliness and to taste in his attire; secret devotion is more prolonged than on other days, as it is more undisturbed; the family is in due time summoned around the frugal meal, it being perhaps the only day in the week in which they all meet at the same board; kind words and of affectionate counsels are interchanged; events in the family history are alluded to, and made the theme of edifying reflection; family-worship follows, and on this occasion the little family choir is unbroken, and sends up its full-voiced praise to heaven. The time has come for joining the companies that are already crowding to the houses of prayer. A brief interval, and a second frugal meal follows, and there is another ascent to the temple to worship God. Then comes the happy Sabbath evening, in which the Christian parents gather their children around them for religious instruction, and for recalling and reviewing the lessons of the sanctuary. Domestic affection has time to expatiate and grow in that Sabbath atmosphere; the Bible and other religious books are read; psalms and hymns are joyfully sung. Mercy joins her work with that of piety; the sick and the sorrowful are visited and comforted; neglected children are taught in the Sabbath-school; unreclaimed masses are evangelised in the mission district. The family once more re-assembles at the evening meal, and the Sabbath is closed with family worship, meditation, and secret devotion; and as the members of the household pass away to their nightly rest, it is felt that its hours have not been wearisome or unprofitable, but that they have in truth been all too short for the blessed work that was to be done in them.
3. It will not be wondered at, after these details, that in Scotland we claim the entire Sabbath for religion, not only because it forms part of our most sacred convictions that it has been so conferred upon us by the unrepealed act of Heaven, but also because we are of opinion that, within narrower limits than this, the Sabbath must ever fail to work out, to its proper extent, all its beneficent designs. Anything less than this would be something like placing the sun under a partial eclipse, which you yet expected to ripen the fruits of the world. Suppose the period of the Sabbath to be restricted, as some would wish, to the hours of public worship, and men suddenly to pass from business or pleasure to the sanctuary, and then to pass with equal suddenness from the sanctuary to business or pleasure again, even the benefit of the season of public worship would be more than half lost. Nature in most men is incapable of violent transitions; it must have its dawn and its twilight; and were our Sabbath to consist only of the time that we spent in the temple, the world would be far more likely to introduce its corrupting and debasing influence into the Church, than the Church to send out its healing streams upon the world. It is no mere theory or conjecture this; for the experiment was actually tried in England in the reign of our Sixth James, in the publication of "The Book of Sports," when it was sought to make games and morris-dances alternate on Sabbaths with public religious worship; and the effect was to neutralise the power of the pulpit, and to deluge the land with frivolity, irreligion, and vice. There must be the preparation and attuning of the mind for public devotion and instruction, by secret prayer and meditation; there must be the recollection and the holy repose of the soul afterwards; there must be the hallowed intermingling of deeds of charity with exercises of piety, and room for the revival and the play of home affections, if the Sabbath is to shed all the good which the beneficence of Heaven has put into it, upon churches and nations.
And if there is need for such a Sabbath in any country, and among any people, even were they as pastoral and contemplative in their daily habits as Abraham in Canaan, or as Moses when tending the flocks of Jethro, it is immeasurably more indispensable to the intellectual and religious wellbeing of men living in old countries such as Scotland or England, where over-population has unduly crowded the market of labour, and given rise to an unhealthy competition, in which men often need to strain their wits and their energies to the utmost in order simply to live. Nothing will save a people in such a community from an undue mental strain unfavourable alike to intellectual and moral health, and even from being wrought in great numbers to death, but the weekly recurrence of a day which is fenced off and guarded by Divine prescription, and attachment to which is deeply rooted in the religious convictions and the gratitude of the people. There are tens of thousands of our industrial classes, and even multitudes among our men of business, who seldom see the younger members of their families, except on Sabbath-day. And to what a debasing monotony of toil would the lives of these men speedily be reduced, were it not for the anticipation of the coming day of hallowed rest, in which the artisan should know no master, and the master himself should be disturbed by no postman's rap or din of business, and should exchange his ledger for his Bible, and the hardening influences of commercial competition and rivalry for the softening and purifying influences of home and of the house of God. On this day, our sons of toil stand erect in the full consciousness of their manhood and of their heavenly birthright; and shall the day which brings such privilege and blessing to man be described as a restraint? It is such a restraint as the shutting of the door of the ark was to Noah, which kept the deluge out, and the patriarch safe. It is like the fence of flowers which we may imagine to have been drawn around Paradise when Adam dwelt in it; and to many a wearied and wasted labourer, when this day has returned with healing in its wings, it has seemed as if the primeval curse was suspended, and Eden threw open its closed gates for a season to receive the wanderer back.
4. It is true, then, speaking of the people of Scotland generally, that we rest our Sabbath observance on Divine appointment, and that we cling tenaciously to a whole Sabbath. This is our crown, which I trust no one will ever take from us, and which, indeed, can only be lost in a community of free men, by being voluntarily and guiltily abdicated. But in what I have hitherto said, I have spoken more of our Scottish principles than of our Scottish practice; and when I come to speak of this, I find myself constrained to protest against two opposite representations that have been given of our Sabbath-keeping, the one in the form of injurious caricature, and the other in a style of over-colouring that very greatly exceeds the sober reality. Of all the bold pictures in which certain of our modern novelists have indulged, there is none in which they have allowed their imaginations a more wild and unwarranted licence, than in the pictures with which they have entertained their readers of a Sabbath in a Scottish family. These pictures have been creations rather than caricatures. And there have been travellers who have become writers of fiction when they have touched on this subject, and who have quite equalled the novel-writers in the liberties they have taken with the simple truth. One writer, presuming, we suppose, on the safe distance of his readers from the scene which he describes, gravely informs them that in the city of Edinburgh all the window-blinds are kept carefully closed during the whole of the Sabbath, as if to attemper the gloom of the house to the gloomy state of mind of its inmates, and describes the little children as cowering under a vague sense of awe, and dreading to indulge even an innocent smile. Men who write thus may safely be affirmed never to have spent a single Sabbath-day in a religious family in Scotland. That the Sabbath is in no instance presented in a repulsive form before the young, by their rather being told what they are not to do, than of the blessed work to which the Sabbath summons them, it would be too much to affirm; for what institution of heaven does not occasionally suffer from human handling? But our danger, even in Scotland, in these days, does not arise from over-restraint or scrupulosity; and we speak from long and happy experience, when we assert that our Sabbath-keeping in Scotland is usually marked by a calm cheerfulness without frivolity, and that on that day, above all others, streams of gladness flow through myriads of hearts which have their secret and their fountain-head not in the exclusion of religion, but in the more complete turning of the mind to religious thoughts and associations.
"Then wisdom's self
Oft seeks to sweet, retired solitude,
Where, with her best nurse, Contemplation,
She plumes her feathers, and lets go her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired."
How is it but on this account, that Scotsmen who have emigrated to our colonies have in so many instances written of their Sabbath evenings at home as among the most "sunny memories" of their youth? And it is a fact of much significance that an old ecclesiastical law of Scotland expressly provides that a religious fast shall never be held on the Lord's day, for this special reason, that the Sabbath was intended to be a day of joy.
5. On the other hand, we are bound to acknowledge that there have been foreign brethren who have visited our island-shores, that have traced the picture of our Scottish Sabbath in colours greatly brighter than the reality.—They have only seen half the truth, and therefore they have only told the half. As they have beheld the streams of our church-going people crowding along the streets of our cities to our numerous temples, they have failed to reflect how even the best gifts of heaven, the Sabbath and the sunlight, are the most ready to be abused, and that, at that very moment, there were thousands loitering at home in indolence, and even not a few, perhaps, rioting in intemperance. At the same time, with all these sombre exceptions, that are necessary to be introduced as shadows into any truthful picture of a Scottish Sabbath, we do not wonder that good and intelligent visitors from continental countries have been impressed and delighted by the spectacle of such a day in Scotland. These are but exceptions after all. And there is surely something of high moral sublimity in the sight of a whole people, once in every week, ceasing from their business and their toil to celebrate the great facts of Creation and Redemption—"the plough left to sleep in the furrow," the loom motionless, the anvil silent, the mine and the factory tenantless, and the whole monotony of common life turned and elevated into a kind of sacred praise. This solemn pause over the wide extent of Scotland, seen still more perfectly in her rural districts than in her great cities, strikes us as the nearest approach we have ever known to national worship. And we do not wonder that all the great poets of our land,—our uninspired prophets, whose work it is to reflect and to idealise our purest national feelings,—should so often have "sung the Sabbath," and that the Sabbath pictures of our national poet Burns in his "Cottar's Saturday Night," though, alas, he seldom consecrated his great gifts to religion, shine as the most beautiful passages in a poem that seems marked for immortality.