My Lord,
Divided as the country is in its political and religious sentiments, there is one subject on which there is a very great unanimity: and I may add also that this union of opinion exists among the most moral of your countrymen; the most loyal supporters of the throne and the constitution; the most enlightened members of the community; and the most benevolent and philanthropic individuals in the empire. I need not say that the point on which all these persons are agreed is “The observance of Sabbath.” Here, my Lord, you have thousands or rather millions of citizens who never trouble the realm in any way by their vices or disorderly conduct; who are never brought before magistrates or judges for their offences; and who require no soldiers or police to watch over them and keep them from disturbing the commonwealth.
It is a matter of surprise to all sober and reflecting minds that you, my Lord, should wish to set yourself in an attitude of antagonism towards all these peaceful and religious men and women; and especially that you should do this most gratuitously and in defiance of your own creed.
In proposing to have the Pleasure Grounds of the new Crystal Palace thrown open during one half of the Lord’s-day, you involved yourself in a responsibility which no one called upon you to incur, except a small body of railway speculators, and a few theoretic and practical rejectors of the commandments of the Most High. Your coadjutors and instigators are those who never allow a word of Scripture to stand in the way of their views, their pleasures, their prejudices, or their love of gain. It has become popular of late years for prime ministers “to do evil that good may come.” The Maynooth grant was asked for by few. The Catholics themselves did not want it. There has rarely been a measure which met with such unanimous opposition; but still it was carried—most tyrannically carried—in defiance of the voice of the nation: and, how has it worked? The believers in Roman Catholicism knew that it was intended as a bribe, and therefore an insult; and have resolved that they will not be converted into spiritual chattels, or have their zeal quenched or consciences silenced by Government pay. The money was taken from our pockets to purchase state patronage for the premier and his partisans, but the artifice has proved a perfect failure, for the followers of Pio Nono have shown that they are not to be bought. Your measure, my Lord, concerning the Sabbath is as perfectly gratuitous as the Maynooth scheme.
I. In wishing to grant a charter for the violation of the Lord’s-day, you, my Lord, tried to play the same game as your predecessors. The profit of a small company of railway kings was the chief thing sought; and to obtain their smile, you were willing to risk the favour of the King of Kings, to endanger the morals of the country, and consequently the Throne, the Constitution, and the Church; and you were also setting yourself in an attitude of defiance against the best and most patriotic of your countrymen. There might, my Lord, have been boldness in this effort of yours to undermine the Sabbath and trample upon the consciences of the majority of the nation, but the infatuation was equal to the courage. You have long been ambitious of power. The deep and settled opinion in your own mind for a long time has been, that both as a profoundly wise and apostolically religious man, you, my Lord, and you alone, were the only person in the realm qualified to guide the affairs of this great empire. Your Lordship has for some years put yourself forward as the bulwark of the Church and of pure Christianity. All persons who differed from you have been viewed as heretics and sinners exceedingly; and you are, according to your own showing, a model saint, the moral hero and spiritual Wellington of religion and the Bible; and yet, after all these high pretensions, no sooner were you in power than your first effort on behalf of Christianity was to announce to the country that you were about to set the authority of your royal mistress against the command of the King of Heaven; and, in doing so, you alienated from yourself and your administration the minds of the majority of the religious people whom you promised to serve if you could only obtain the reins of government.
By many of the most devout members of your Church, your premiership was hailed as the advent of another Luther or Wickliffe, and you covered all these with chagrin and shame by your gratuitous violation of the law of the Most High. There never was a specimen of greater infatuation in a statesman who aimed at popularity and almost vaunted of preeminence in religious zeal. You, my Lord, great as your power may have been, were hardly high enough to despise the favour or indignation of the Ruler of the Universe. Read history, my Lord, and you cannot find a single Sabbath breaking nation but has paid dearly for its ungodliness. The Lord’s-day, scripturally observed, would have saved France from the convulsions and bloodshed which have made it a warning to the world. Sabbath breaking sent the Jews to Babylon, and gave them seventy years of captivity that “the land might enjoy her Sabbath,” and that all ages might learn that the Almighty will not have His commands set at nought with impunity.
But supposing you had possessed such power that you could have said, “I fear not God,” yet sound policy might have suggested that it would be well to have some “regard to man.” You really were not quite secure in your post as prime minister. A few votes of the senate deprived you in an instant of all your authority; and you fell because you rendered yourself unpopular in the estimation of the nation. You ought also to know that religion is a sacred thing in the eyes of all, whether Pagans, Jews, Mahommedans, or Christians. To touch the ark has brought destruction upon many an “Uzzah” without any special intervention of heaven; and you, my Lord, are not too high for their doom. The majority which sustained you in office was very small and doubtful; and nothing sunk you so low in the estimation of thousands as this Sabbath desecration, which you proposed to establish by a royal charter!! By many you were looked upon as the bulwark of the Church and religion; and by your own speeches you wished to make the country believe that you were a very godly man; and yet without the least substantial reason you blasted all their hopes, and, in their estimation, you have denied the faith, and become worse than an infidel—because an unbeliever has no reverence, and can have no reverence for the Word of God; but you profess to believe in its divine origin, and to be guided by its sacred injunctions, and thus sinned with your eyes open: you have therefore foolishly, most gratuitously, alienated your friends, and hastened your own downfal, and all to please the avarice and fill the coffers of a small clique of gentlemen who prefer “gain to godliness.”
II. You have not only been guilty of the most gratuitous presumption and rashness, but you have also acted in defiance of your own creed. You, my Lord, according to your own showing, are a very religious, indeed, an apostolically religious, man—a believer in the Church Catechism, and in the doctrine of confirmation. Doubtless your Lordship has been confirmed; and I may presume that you go to church as often as the majority of your order; and, when there, you listen very attentively to the reading of the decalogue, and after each precept you most devoutly and sincerely repeat the prayer, “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law!” At the end of the tenth command you vary the words, and say, “Lord have mercy upon us, AND WRITE ALL THESE THY LAWS IN OUR HEARTS, WE BESEECH THEE.”
In the Communion Service of the Prayer Book, I read the following words:—“Then shall the priest, turning to the people, rehearse distinctly ALL THE TEN commandments; and the people, still kneeling, shall after every commandment ask mercy for their transgression thereof, and grace to keep the same for time to come.” In accordance with this direction the clergyman in a solemn voice commences with Exodus xx. 1: “God spake these words and said;” and thus wishes to impress upon the devout and kneeling audience before him, that the laws which he is about to rehearse are the identical laws which were once proclaimed by Jehovah himself, and that they have now all the majesty and authority of the Divine Legislator which they have ever had. When he comes to the fourth, he reads, “Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, thy man servant, and thy maid servant, thy cattle, and the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it.” No sooner are these words ended, than you, my Lord, and all true Churchmen, all newspaper editors and railway directors, who go to church on Sunday mornings, repeat the solemn prayer given above. In the sentence, “Lord have mercy upon us,” you confess that you have broken the commandment, and pray the God of Heaven to grant you “mercy” for the past; and in the following words, “Incline our hearts to keep this law,” you entreat Jehovah to renew your hearts, and give you an inclination to obey the “Fourth Commandment” in future. Are you, my Lord, sincere in this prayer and supplication? Are your Church friends among the nobility, railway companies, and newspaper editors, who use this form of devotion, sincere? The Son of God tests our love by our obedience. “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” are his sacred injunctions, plainly teaching us that if we violate his commands we give a public demonstration that we do not love him. Now, to keep the Sabbath one half of the day and violate it the other, is to furnish but a very poor proof that we feel any deference for the Fourth Commandment.
My Lord, would you be satisfied that your commands to your servants should be half broken and half kept? Are you pleased with your coachman if he drives you half way to church on the Sabbath when your command is to be driven all the way? Do you like to have your will in any other particular but half done? Would you be pleased to have your hunters and racehorses but half fed and half groomed, or your food but half cooked? Yet we may ask, Who is the Earl of Derby, that his commands should be perfectly obeyed to the very letter, while the God of Heaven, at the instance of this same Earl of Derby, is to be satisfied with only a moiety of that obedience which he has enjoined in the Scripture?