“How welcome to the saint, when pressed
With 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 breast
And 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 now been 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,
March 10th, 1853.