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 his servants, 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 Sundays would 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 use moral means 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 manner of 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 “the HEALTH, COMFORT, and MORALS of 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 with the 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,