The idea, my Lord, that large numbers of the masses will run down to the Crystal Palace every Sunday is an idle fancy. What will it cost for a man to take his wife and children to Sydenham? In many instances from six to ten shillings will be needed! Will Mr. Mayhew’s Spitalfields weavers be able to spare this sum? How many times a year will they go? How many of them will go? For unless they go very often, we are afraid that their moral improvement will not be very great; and, during the Sabbaths that the people stay at home, there will be no very great diminution of the crowds that occupy the filthy lanes and alleys of London. Will enough on any one Sunday leave their houses to cause any visible decrease of the inhabitants? Will whole families go? or will there not be a separation of its members—some gone to the Crystal Palace, and coming home drunk or ruined, while the poor wife and other portions of the household will be left in solitude at home? One would suppose, to hear some people talk, that as soon as Sydenham is opened, all the miserable wretches in London, all the ragged half starved creatures, and especially all the poor operatives in Spitalfields, will, by some magic or miracle, be well clothed, have plenty of cash in their pockets, and after going to church very devoutly one half of the Sabbath, hurry away in full glee to the Crystal Palace on the other, and thus their future Sundays all through the year will be passed between the celestial paradise of the temple and the earthly Elysium at Sydenham!! No one after this will laugh, if a new body of speculators should arise and propose to take these said paupers and operatives to visit the moon and all the planets every Lord’s-day. And thus, my Lord, for an imagined good, which it would be the most arrant folly to anticipate, you are about to sacrifice the home comforts, the health, the morals, and the lives of a large number of the most valuable of your countrymen. The same principle that led you to legislate respecting cruelty to animals, and to the men, women, and children in factories and mines, calls upon you to interpose the authority of the law, and say to the Sydenham gentlemen, “There shall be no labour on the Sabbath.”
We are told that if the men hire themselves out to this drudgery it will be a voluntary act of their own. Granted, my Lord; but still when a husband and father, who has a wife and family crying for bread, is told that he may have employment if he will break the Sabbath, but that famine shall be the result of his resting on the Lord’s-day, there is great danger that many will prefer transgression to poverty and want. All persecutors are perfect voluntaries. It was quite optional for Stephen to be stoned; for the disciples to be imprisoned; for Huss, Latimer, and Hooper to be burnt; for the pilgrim fathers to emigrate to America; and for the Madiai to go to gaol. Persecutors are among the fairest people under heaven. They generally set comfort and torture, life and death, before their victims, and give them a perfect choice of either. Formerly burning was fashionable; but now starvation is nearly all the rage. We do not burn people in this enlightened day. We are too refined, for we live in the nineteenth century, to be sure. No persecution now, forsooth, we are too humane for that. We only say to the famishing operative or peasant, “You must go to church, or starve!” “you must go to chapel, or starve!” “you must spend your Sabbaths on Sydenham Railway, or starve!” Now I really think, my Lord, if you had your choice, notwithstanding all our boasting of religious liberty and charity, that you would as soon be burnt by Bonner as starved to death, wife, family and all, by these more refined modern persecutors. For say what you will, Sunday labour is not only inhuman and cruel, but it is persecution, and ought to be as much restrained by the hand of the law as any other oppression which would prevent men from worshipping God. I knew one of the best of men in London leave his fatherland and become an emigrant because of the Sunday labour at the Post Office, and thus the government lost a good servant by this persecution. And we shall soon have on a large scale a new race of pilgrim fathers, who will seek refuge in a foreign land that they may enjoy the Sabbath which they are refused in their own Christian country. To turn a man off from work because he fears God and keeps the Sabbath is persecution. The civil government is as much bound to protect the day for worship as the temple in which the man worships.
Again we repeat, we desire no interference with the religious opinions of anyone. Let men spend their Sabbath as they please, provided they do not compel others to any unnecessary work. The laws respecting murder, theft, cruelty to animals, prisons, nuisances, factory labour, do not interfere with the religion of Catholic, Protestant, Episcopalian, or Dissenter. They merely protect the health, the bodies and rights of the people, and on these principles we call on the legislature in the name of humanity, of justice, of health, life, right, and freedom, to prohibit Sabbath labour.
Drowning men catch at straws, and you are in danger, my Lord, of being seduced by certain individuals who call themselves liberal dissenters, and profess to expound the sentiments of their brethren. They will tell you that you must not legislate to prevent the poor man from being robbed and killed by Sunday labour, because it is a religious question!! But you must beware of these gentlemen. They have not the confidence of their brethren, nor do they represent their views. Their sentiments are as outrageous as they are ultra. To say that Dissent allows the working man to be robbed and slain by oppressive masters; to be starved to death, or persecuted into exile, is one of the foulest libels that has ever been uttered. These men have not yet learnt the duties of civil legislation. They have not distinguished between physical and religious—between bodily and spiritual matters; they have not learnt that in some points human and divine legislation must go hand in hand; nor have they ascertained where the one is to stop or where the two are to diverge. A man who holds with a “Ten Hours Bill,” with laws to prevent cruelty to women, children, and animals; with statutes to prevent murder, theft, and swindling, and yet protests that you must not protect the bodies of men from Sabbath labour, is a novice in humanity, and has yet to learn his political alphabet. Sabbath labour is inhuman; Sabbath labour is robbery; Sabbath labour is cruelty; Sabbath labour is persecution; Sabbath labour is deadly; and therefore ought to be restrained by the authority of the law.
Some of them become very religious and tell you that every day, under the Christian dispensation, is to be a Sabbath; but they do not mean what they say. Sabbath, my Lord, signifies REST from labour; and if every day is to be a Sabbath, then we must rest from labour everyday, and never do any work at all! Jehovah has said, “six days shalt thou labour and do all that thou hast to do, but the seventh is the DAY OF REST.” Rest from labour is one of the essential ideas included in the word Sabbath; and these pious people say that every day is to be a Sabbath, and therefore a day of rest from toil; for where there is no cessation from labour, there is no Sabbath in the scriptural meaning of the term. But so perverted are these reasoners, that they tell us though Sabbath means rest from labour, yet people are now at perfect liberty to work all the day, and Sydenham adventurers ought therefore to be allowed to rob, demoralize, and kill a portion of the population by Sunday toil!! The reasoning of these gentlemen is as logical as their legislation is liberal and humane.
“Ah, but” they say, “The Sabbath is abolished!” But where, my Lord, is the repeal mentioned? “Oh,” they gravely reply, “The Sabbath was made for man.” That is, it was benevolently instituted for the rest of his physical frame and the edification of his soul. Ergo, it is abolished!! Glorious reasoning, my Lord! But still they argue, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” Ergo, the Sabbath is abrogated, and he is the Lord of a nonentity!!
“No man is to judge us in respect of new moons and Sabbaths.” Ergo, the Lord is not to judge us, although he has given us the ten commandments, and told us that they are not abolished, and that the law is not in any point made void by faith.
“The day is changed from the seventh to the first. Ergo, it is abolished!!” Change and abolition synonyms!! The Apostles for a while observed the seventh day that they might preach to the Jews, and the first day that they might assemble as Christians, and at length, in obedience to their Lord’s will, these inspired men dropped the seventh and kept the first alone, but retained the spirit of the law by assembling every seventh day, and therefore, to be sure, broke up the Sabbath altogether!! Whether these are “sequiturs” or “non sequiturs,” I leave your Lordship to judge.
But then we are so spiritual in these Gospel days, that we do not need a Sabbath. Ergo, we show our spirituality by secularizing the Sabbath!! Of course we are more spiritual than the Creator who consecrated one day in seven; more spiritual than Adam in innocency; than Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, the Prophets, our Lord, or the Apostles; and therefore we can do without such vulgar things as Sabbaths or religious instruction. Doubtless the Gospel has given us iron nerves and muscles to labour incessantly; and now forsooth we are all born with instinctive morality, theology, and devotion, and can do without such old fashioned, obsolete lumber as religious edification! And yet, my Lord, we who thus boast are the most Mammon worshipping, worldly minded people under heaven. We are so spiritually minded that we wish the labourer to work seven days instead of six; that we open the Crystal Palace on Sundays for the sole purpose of getting money out of the pockets of the people! We are so spiritual that almost everything we do is contaminated with selfishness! We are so evangelical and heavenly that we are robbing and killing our fellow creatures by Sunday labour, and are agitating to increase these hecatombs of human victims offered to avarice. “The Song of the Shirt” is no exaggeration, and therefore what a spiritual and benevolent people we must be! What wicked fellows those infidels are who doubt the divine origin of this cruel caricature of Christianity which we give them in our deeds, and how depraved they must be to say to such spiritually minded souls, “What do ye more than others?” What a blessed proof of heavenly mindedness, that we can rob men of their Sabbath and lives, and then thank God that we are not as other men are!
“But the early Christians did not legislate concerning the Sabbath,” say your new friends. But then you know, my Lord, that they did not ask the government to make any laws against murder or theft; they did not agitate against slavery; for the franchise; for corn-laws, or their repeal; for the Union, or “The Separation of the Church and State,” &c. &c.; and if we imitate them, we shall give up civil legislation altogether. What Paul would have done, if he had been a Member of Parliament, we can hardly say; still, we may safely affirm that he would as soon have voted to keep men from being robbed, persecuted, and killed by Sabbath labour, as he would for a bill to prevent cruelty to men, women, children, or animals, and would hardly have dreamt that in so doing he was violating the great principles of religious liberty.