What, my Lord, if you comprehended all your own wishes in “Ten Commands,” and summoned all your servants into your presence once a week and directed your chief steward to read in their ears your injunctions, commencing with the sentence, “The Earl of Derby spake these words and said”; and what if all your attendants fell on their knees before you, and, in the most pitiful language, confessed that they had rebelled against your precepts; implored mercy for their transgressions; earnestly entreated you to assist them in their future efforts to do your pleasure; and, having satisfied themselves that you had pardoned them, immediately rose from the ground and resolved in future to be more guilty than ever by neglecting your commands altogether, or by only attending to half their import! Could you put up, my Lord, with this farce week after week and year after year? Would it require fifty-two repetitions of such insolence to exhaust your patience? Would the Earl of Derby allow himself to be thus insulted even a second time? Would you not denounce these impudent menials as a set of mocking hypocrites? But is it a matter of more importance that the Earl of Derby should not be mocked than that the God of Heaven should be worshipped in sincerity and in truth? Let me then entreat your Lordship, as you value your present consistency and future happiness, either to reverence the Fourth Commandment, or else cease to use the prayer attached to it in the Liturgy.
But perhaps you may say, “that you neither disobey it, nor teach others to do so.” I need not tell your Lordship, as a learned man, and the Chancellor of one of the great seats of learning, that the day mentioned by Moses, and which you pray the Almighty to give you grace to observe, is TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LONG; that during these twenty-four hours we are commanded to abstain from all manner of work; that we are “to keep the day holy to Jehovah,” and consequently to observe it religiously by not “doing our own ways, finding our own pleasure, or speaking our own words.” Such is the command of the King of Kings. How then can the half observance of the Lord’s-day be reconciled with the divine command to keep the whole? If the railway to Sydenham is to be worked on the Sabbath, and the pleasure grounds thrown open, you will of necessity doom a large number of clerks, stokers, drivers, porters, waiters and others to labour on that day on which Jehovah has commanded that no work shall be done. The God of Heaven says, “Thou shalt do no manner of work”; but the Earl of Derby tells the people that they may work on the Sabbath! You thus set yourself in a position of antagonism against the Creator of the Universe. The Scriptures assert that “The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath”; but you, my Lord, intimate that the Earl of Derby is the Lord of the Sabbath!! When “God spake,” he solemnly commanded that the whole day should be observed; but when the Earl of Derby spoke, he said “Let half the day be kept,” thus making himself not only equal but superior to the Almighty!
It is no use, my Lord, to plead that only a few hands comparatively will be employed, because you have no right to doom even one man to lose his day of rest and sin against God, for the gain and gratification of others. One soul is of more value than the whole world; and I query whether your Lordship will be willing to stand at the bar of the Eternal in the stead of the poor labourers whom you condemned to toil on the seventh day, and thus converted into Sabbath breakers. And it would not be one, two, or ten, who would be robbed of the rest of the Sabbath, but the opening the grounds at Sydenham on Sunday would be the condemnation of hundreds of our countrymen to this seventh-day slavery. Why should railway companies be permitted to exact Sunday labour from their servants, and yet grocers, drapers, tradesmen, and manufacturers be prohibited from similar gains? The age is passing away for legislative favouritism; and if one company may have royal authority to work, oppress and destroy their vassals, why should not all the shops be thrown open: why should not the anvil, the saw and the spade be used, and all apprentices and labourers be called upon to be Sunday slaves? Such labour will minister to the pleasure and profit of many. It is rather remarkable, that almost the same day in which your good lady was announced, in connection with the Duchess of Sutherland and others, as an opponent to American slavery, you, my Lord, proclaimed yourself as the patron of English slavery! and might have founded your arguments on the same principles as the Transatlantic planters. Uncle Tom was enslaved for the profit and pleasure of his masters; and clerks, drivers, stokers, &c., &c., are to be enslaved on the Sabbath to enrich their employers, and to minister to the gratification of the irreligious portion of the community who “are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.” Indeed, the American slave in many instances is allowed his full day of rest on the Sabbath; but the white slave of the railway and of Sydenham is to know nothing of the repose of that day which Jehovah has set apart for the benefit not only of the sons and daughters of toil, but also of animals, for it was one of God’s commands to the Jews that “the ox and the ass should rest.”
Of course, my Lord, if you persevere now you are out of office, in this wish to have the Sabbath desecrated, you will also, in accordance with your public DISSENT from the Church of England, demand that the Prayer Book shall be altered. You will for consistency sake request the Convocation, to which you are said to be very favourable, to immediately set about the re-formation of the Liturgy as their very first work. By all means let the Fourth Commandment be omitted from the Catechism; let all reference to it be erased from the Baptismal Service; let sponsors no longer be called upon “to promise and vow” that their godchildren shall “keep God’s holy will and commandments and walk in the same all the days of their life”; and, in the service of Confirmation, let the candidates be duly taught that in taking their vows upon them, they are, on the authority of the Earl of Derby, freed from the observance of the Sabbath; let the priests of the Church also be informed that to read the Fourth Commandment is an absurdity now it is abolished; and above all, never again let heaven be mocked, piety outraged, and common sense insulted by the repetition of the prayer, “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” Why should not a second book of sports be read from the pulpits of the Establishment, and the people be duly apprised that the words of the Eternal respecting the seventh day, “In it thou shalt do no manner of work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man servant, thy maid servant, thy cattle, and the stranger within thy gates,” are now of no force, for the Earl of Derby has proclaimed that railway speculators may compel their servants to work on the seventh day, and as a consequence that all other persons may “go and do likewise”?
You have, my Lord, by your changing, often surprised your countrymen; but this wish to trample the Prayer Book in the dust, to set Baptism, Catechism, Confirmation, the Communion Service, and the Word of God at defiance, is a revolution which none of your friends or foes were prepared to expect, and should you succeed will be attended with greater evils to the masses and greater calamities to the nation than have ever yet occurred. England owes all to her Bible and her Sabbaths; and I may add, that the Scriptures would have been of little good without her Sabbaths. Abolish, my Lord, the rest of the seventh day, and you may write “Ichabod” on our walls. The Bible has been but partially studied by those nations who reject the Lord’s-day, and their history and present condition show that they have paid very dearly for this neglect.
But, my Lord, if you have power, supposing you were prime minister, to annul the Fourth Commandment, then you have power to abolish all the rest. If you can command that the Sabbath shall be half kept and can give men a charter to break the other half, you certainly have power to allow them to break it altogether; and if you can grant a royal commission to violate one precept of the decalogue, you can license the people to break the whole. And, my Lord, you must not stop, for there are persons to whom the Sixth, the Seventh and Eighth Commandments are as great an obstruction to their profit or pleasure as the Fourth Command is to the Sydenham gentlemen. How many thieves could enrich themselves but for the Eighth Command; and how many might relieve themselves of the burden of dependents or jump into rich inheritances, by trampling the Sixth in the dust! Yea, my Lord, were they only allowed by a royal charter to violate one half of these commandments, by half starving, half killing and half robbing their fellow creatures, no one can tell the property that might be saved or gained. Here would be a “MAGNA CHARTA” with a vengeance, and one, my Lord, which would immortalize your name to all eternity. The dead, by the million, would proclaim your fame or your infamy. And there can be no just reason given why, if you granted a charter to railway speculators to enable them to rob their servants of the Sabbath, you should not give other worshippers of Mammon equal power to plunder and oppress; for I shall presently have to show that to deprive the physical frame of rest once in seven days is both robbery and murder, and therefore if you begin to charter these outrages, you will find it difficult to stop. It will be only for any company to make out a case and prove that pleasure and profit will be the result of oppression, robbery and death, and you, to be consistent, must advocate their cause.
The change in The Prayer Book too must be greater than at first was contemplated. Instead of praying “Lord have mercy upon us, and write ALL these THY commandments in our hearts, we beseech thee”; or, when the fourth is abolished, “Lord have mercy upon us, and write NINE of these THY commandments in our hearts, we beseech thee,” you will have to obliterate them from the Liturgy altogether. And indeed wherever in the prayers, thanksgivings, or collects there is any reference to the commandments of Jehovah, the words must be omitted in the re-formed Prayer Book. Of course, my Lord, after this great and stupendous change, we shall hear no more of the heresy of Nonconformists, and the wonder of modern times will be, not, “Is Saul among the prophets?” but, “Is the Earl of Derby among dissenters?”
Other Prayer Book reforms, my Lord, will have to follow. To preserve your consistency it will be needful to omit the Lord’s Prayer. Five times in the full morning service of your Church the petition is offered, “Lead us not into temptation,” and yet when your devotions are ended you wish to proclaim by royal charter that the people shall be tempted to break the Sabbath. I need not tell your Lordship as a learned divine, that “temptation,” in the prayer alluded to, means, temptation “to sin,” and that “to sin” is to violate the commandments of Jehovah. When therefore you pray not to be led “into temptation,” you intimate that your nature is weak, and entreat our heavenly Father to prevent your being placed in any position in which your pious principles would be likely to give way. How strange then that you, who are so sensitive of your own frailty, notwithstanding the robustness of your piety, should propose to have the young, the morally feeble and undecided, tempted every seventh day to trample the commandment of heaven in the dust! Surely, my Lord, if it is of so much importance that yourself and all the railway directors and pious newspaper editors who go to church, should be kept from temptation, that you pray five times in the morning service for divine protection, then it is also necessary that the poor vulgar herd of sinners, who have so little of your apostolical godliness, should also be preserved from temptation. It seems inexplicably marvellous that you should exhibit so much care of your own piety and morality, and yet be so reckless about the virtue of your poorer neighbours as actually to propose that other persons, by royal charter, should be led into that very temptation to sin from which you five times on the Sabbath morning entreat the Almighty to enable you to escape. Either, my Lord, invite the Convocation to obliterate the Lord’s Prayer as well as the ten commandments from the Liturgy, or else cease to instigate the nation to rebel against the Word of God. In fact, if you continue to advocate Sabbath breaking, you ought to leave the Church and reject the Liturgy, or to have the words “command” and “commandments” expunged from every prayer and collect in the Prayer Book.
Need I remind your Lordship, that the words “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,” refer to the ten commandments? The kingdom of God will come when his commands are obeyed, just as the kingdom of our Queen extends wherever her laws are observed. Where the laws of England are trampled in the dust, there the sceptre of Victoria is set at nought; and just in the same manner, so long as the laws of the decalogue are disregarded, the kingdom of God cannot come. “The will of God” will “be done in earth as it is in heaven,” when his laws are obeyed, because his will is embodied in his commandments. But if you propose to grant the nation or a few of your favourites a royal charter to break the divine commands, doubtless you will also have the petitions “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,” “deliver us from evil,” &c., &c., erased from the Lord’s Prayer and from the Prayer Book. Indeed so few of the words of the Saviour will remain, when all reference to obedience to the laws of God is obliterated, that for very shame the mutilated part must be abandoned.
I cannot imagine that after proposing this charter for Sabbath breaking, you will ever repeat the words, “God be merciful unto us and bless us, and show us the light of his countenance and be merciful unto us. That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.” God’s “way” is his commandments, and there is no “saving health” except in obeying them. But to give a royal charter to set at nought the Fourth or any other Command, is to do what you can to prevent God’s “way” from being “known upon the earth,” and therefore of course you will have this Psalm expunged from evening service, or else never unite in repeating or chanting it. Your conduct, my Lord, for the sake of consistency, must demand the most sweeping alterations in the Prayer Book.