A Few Words on the Crystal Palace Question

by C. J. Vaughan

No Clergyman who values his own ease will write on either side of a question connected however remotely with that of Sunday observance. If he takes the one side, the world accuses him of bigotry: if the other, his brethren stigmatize him as a Latitudinarian. What is worse, he runs the risk of either furnishing a handle to the irreligious, or perplexing and depressing the thoughtful and serious.

Nor is the danger removed by his occupying a position of the utmost possible moderation, acknowledging the strength of both sides, and endeavouring to adjust with all evenness their conflicting claims. The only result is, that he becomes the prey of both parties: each holds on its way, and the voice of candour is silenced by the uproar.

Yet the truth must be spoken. No personal considerations ought to suppress it. No anxiety for the cause of good can justify a timid compromise with error.

It is impossible to reflect without a sense of deep disquiet upon the present position of the Sunday question in England. It is a point on which men’s professions are at war with their conduct. It is a point on which traditional ideas are held in forced conjunction with altered practices. It is a point on which Christian teachers will not speak out. It is a point on which popular prepossessions are accepted as a convenient fact, even where they are felt to rest on insufficient grounds, and to lead to a most inadequate result.

And what is the consequence? Men’s consciences are perplexed. They ask—and there is no audible answer—Why do I observe the Sunday? Is it on the ground of the Mosaic commandment? If so, who has relaxed the strictness of its terms? Where is the permission to do, what we all do, but what Israel did not, on the Sabbath day? Who taught us that in this one instance the Christian rule of keeping the spirit of God’s commandments implies the licence to break the letter?

Questions such as these are left to answer themselves as they can. There remains a large amount of Sabbatical observance: but it is associated with no little bondage of spirit in what is done, and with no little embarrassment of conscience in what is left undone.

And where, meanwhile, is the Christian teacher, wise enough and bold enough to proclaim from his pastoral watch-tower the yoke with which Christ has bound us, the liberty wherewith He has made us free?

Where is he who can encounter, even as St. Paul encountered it, the obloquy which assails in every age the exaltation of the everlasting Gospel, as, not the summary merely, not the expansion merely, not the interpretation merely, but the END—in every sense of that term—of every earlier Dispensation? who ventures to declare that not the fourth Commandment only, but the whole Decalogue, has ceased to be, as such, the rule of our life? that, although Christians commit neither idolatry nor murder nor perjury, it is not because God forbade these crimes by Moses, but because they are contrary to the spirit of Christ? that, in short, their obedience to the unchangeable precepts of God’s moral Law is a homage rendered not to Sinai but to Calvary; so that, if in any point they find in their own Gospel a limitation or a modification or an extension of any earlier enactment, they are conscious of no embarrassment in the regulation of their allegiance—forasmuch as the later is their law, even as the earlier was that of others?

And thus with reference to the observance of the Sabbath, and to every point of moral duty, the appeal lies now, primarily to the Scriptures of the New Testament, and secondarily to any other records which we may possess of the practice of the Apostolical age.

Nor can it be pretended, when the question is fairly examined, that the perpetuation of the Jewish Sabbath is either enjoined, or by implication encouraged, in the words or the writings of the first disciples and Apostles of our Lord.