A Second Letter on the late Post Office Agitation

by C. J. Vaughan

It has been satisfactory to me to receive, from many excellent and well-informed persons, assurances of their entire concurrence in the sentiments of my former Letter. I am neither surprised nor alarmed to find myself assailed, in other quarters, by loud and severe animadversions. You, Sir, have occupied an intermediate ground. You are too well aware of the particular circumstances which occasioned my letter, to accuse me of a gratuitous interference in a wearisome and unthankful controversy. Your strictures, therefore, are confined to some particular points in my argument, which you regard as requiring further elucidation. And you urge me, not so much for your own satisfaction as for that of others, to take the same opportunity of clearing away some misapprehensions to which, in the judgment of persons unacquainted with my opinions, my former Letter may have been exposed.

Half, and more than half, the arguments of my Reviewers would have been felt by themselves to be irrelevant, if they had taken the trouble to observe the circumstances under which my Letter was written. It was not to the general question of the observance of the Sunday, nor even of the extent to which it may be right that the Post Office should observe it, that my remarks were directed. The question before me was this. I am urged, as an act of religious duty, to protest against a particular Order of the Government. I am told, in the most sacred place, that a particular Regulation of the London Post Office is to be regarded no less as an affront to religion, and a violation of the rights of conscience, than as an infraction of the liberties of England. An examination of the question leads me to an opposite conclusion. I believe that the measure thus stigmatized will, so far as it extends, promote rather than impede the interests of religion, will, on the whole, facilitate rather than interfere with the attendance of that class which it concerns upon the ordinances of worship, while it leaves untouched those wider and more general considerations which would involve, if seriously and consistently entertained, a revolution in the management of the whole department. I refuse, therefore, to protest. I refuse to assert, what I see no reason to believe, that the national observance of the Lord’s Day will suffer from this particular modification of an existing system. I refuse to assert, what I think it a most unchristian malignancy to suspect, that the object of this new Regulation was that which is disavowed and repudiated by its authors. I cannot discover in it an insidious but resolute attack upon the holy ordinance of the Christian Sunday. It would have been in me an act of ridiculous affectation to express an alarm in which I did not participate; or to remonstrate against a measure of detail, by way of expressing a principle which was not at issue. So far, however, my duty was but negative. It was discharged by refusing my signature. Nor was it until I heard that refusal (which had ultimately proved sufficiently general to defeat the remonstrance altogether) commented upon afterwards, from the pulpit, in terms, to say the least, of grave disapprobation, that it ever occurred to me to vindicate myself and others from a suspicion of indifference or of timidity, by a statement of the real nature and object of the measure thus impugned.

It was enough, therefore, for my own vindication, enough, I repeat, to justify my refusal to protest, to show that the mere transmission of letters through the London Post Office on the Sunday, taken in connection with its avowed object on the one hand, and with its concomitant measures of relief on the other, was not that affront to religion, that disparagement of Divine ordinances, which alone could necessitate the interposition of a Christian nation for its discomfiture. This was the object of my Letter. This object, steadily kept in view, necessarily confined my argument within narrow limits, and excluded many topics of discussion to which the opponents of the measure would gladly divert our attention.

For example, a Clerical antagonist, [5a] for whose character and evident sincerity I entertain great respect,—and whose name, as he well knows, is enough to secure for him at my hands a degree of forbearance and courtesy which he would think it a dereliction of duty to reciprocate,—complains that I have not enunciated in my Letter any positive opinions of my own as to the grounds of the observance of the Lord’s Day. [5b] To supply this deficiency, he has had recourse to my published Sermons; and, selecting from a Sermon preached on a particular occasion an incidental notice of the question, continues his complaint that there also my language on this subject is vague and unsatisfactory. I can direct him, if a time of unwonted leisure should ever permit him to avail himself of the reference, to three consecutive Discourses on the Lord’s Day, contained in a volume of Parochial Sermons, published four years ago, in which I have entered fully into the discussion, and expressed myself in language to which I still heartily subscribe. You, my dear Sir, will not require to be informed, that there, as everywhere, I have spoken of the Lord’s Day, as every Christian man must speak and think of it, with veneration, with thankfulness, with an earnest and watchful jealousy for its honour. The Author of the “Reply” would have expressed himself, doubtless, in language more eloquent and more impressive, but he could scarcely have used any more decisive as to his own convictions, than that in which the national observance of the Sunday is there enforced. For his information, not for yours, I quote the sentences which follow. [7]

Finally, I would desire to press upon you the responsibility under which the possession of such an ordinance places us, whether we will hear or whether we will forbear. A responsibility to God—for which we must, each and all of us, give account to Him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead. But a responsibility also to our country, and to generations yet perhaps to come. Other nations once had this privilege of a Christian Sabbath; but they have almost or utterly sinned it away. They neglected and abused it, till God took away, by a just retribution, almost the very name of His day from amongst them. There are countries in Christendom, in which Sunday is known almost only as a day of amusement or of common business. England too may one day be brought to this state, unless our responsibilities are better remembered than they are now. Let us, at all events, so honour this holy day ourselves, that our children may inherit it from us as one of the most precious of all the gifts of God. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.”

If any later expression of my opinions be demanded by the anxious vigilance of my inquisitor, let me add a short passage from a Sermon preached to a more youthful congregation on the Sunday before my Letter was written. [8a]

And shall we, a later, but certainly not a holier generation, despise and tread underfoot a gift so gracious? [8b] Shall we thanklessly weigh and measure the amount of observance by which we may avoid condemnation in the use of it? Shall we either count it a weekly burden, a deprivation of one seventh part of life’s legitimate enjoyments; or else turn it from a day of heavenly into one of earthly pleasure, and, because we dare not openly secularize it, presume to nullify it altogether? My brethren, be wiser: wiser as to your own good, wiser as to your own happiness. Be assured that a wasted Sunday is the precursor of a sinful or an unhappy week. Be assured, on the other hand, that He whose gift it is—a gift of love unspeakable, even of that love which laid down life for us—will make it a happy as well as a profitable day, to all who accept it as His gift, and use it for the purpose of growing in the knowledge and love of its Giver.

I have thus far followed the guidance of the Author of the Reply into a field which I still maintain to be foreign to the subject. I owe it to myself, and to the office with which I am entrusted, to leave no room for doubt as to my opinions on so serious a question of duty, even at the risk of embarrassing for the moment a discussion which lies properly in a narrower compass. But the concession, so far as I am concerned, shall end here. I assumed, throughout my Letter, that the national observance of the Sunday is a solemn and sacred duty. But we may surely be allowed to discuss the objects and probable results of a particular change in the working of the London Post Office, without obtruding upon our readers the enquiry whether the Lord’s Day is identical with the Jewish Sabbath, whether the sanctity of the Christian Sunday is derived from the Law or from the Gospel, from “the letter which killeth” or “the spirit that giveth life.” If indeed I were one of those who believe every enactment of the Mosaic Sabbath to be of rigid and perpetual authority, and who yet do and exact on that day, without scruple or remorse, acts which, if so, are worthy of death; or if, while admitting the lawfulness, on that day, for an individual or for a family, of works neither of mercy, strictly speaking, nor of necessity, but only of extreme convenience, (and what more can be said in defence of many of those domestic arrangements with which, I imagine, even the Author of the Reply, even on the Sunday, can scarcely dispense?) I yet denied the possibility of a nations having any such household duties as even the arrival of the Lord’s Day must rather modify than supersede; if I regarded it as a plain and obvious sin for a nation, under any circumstances, to suffer any one of its officers to do any portion of his common work on its holy day; if, in short, I regarded the question as thus foreclosed, by a plain and unequivocal revelation of the Divine will, excluding the consideration of motives, of circumstances, of consequences, altogether;—then certainly, sharing my opponent’s principles, I might have used, with more or less of his severity, something at least of his language; though, even then, I trust I might have possessed sufficient discernment to distinguish between a question of principle, and a question of detail; sufficient respect for the understandings, and regard for the consistency, of my neighbours, to have invited them to a protest rather against the permission of any Sunday work in any Post Office, than against a particular adjustment of that burden to which some had always been subjected.

There is another region, besides, into which I must resolutely refuse to follow my opponent; the region of personalities. He is evidently an adept in the occult science of motives. He speaks, with the irritation of a baffled magician, of any one whose spirit he cannot discern. He confesses that I have puzzled him. He is unwilling to suspect one motive, unable to impute another. The question is left doubtful. [11a] But it is otherwise with Mr. Rowland Hill. He lies helplessly open to the dissecting knife of the operator. And with unflinching severity is it applied. [11b] Hostility to the Sabbath, enmity against religion—these are visibly his principles. All else is a veil, a cloke, a mask. When he speaks of desiring rest on the Sunday for his subordinates, he means labour. When he prefaces his Minute with the profession of regard for the Sunday, he speaks but to deceive, and smiles (vainly smiles, says my Reviewer) at the easy credulity of his victims. [12] When he not only promises, but effects, a measure of undeniable relief,—the discontinuance, for example, of a second Sunday delivery,—this is only to disguise his restless spirit of antichristian malignity, that he may proceed, more covertly, but not less surely, to his real object, the annihilation of an ordinance of God.

I am not the apologist of Mr. Rowland Hill. I know him only, as all the world knows him, as the originator and accomplisher of one of the boldest and most beneficial of all the achievements of modern civilization. It will require more than mere assertion, to attach to his name those odious imputations which it is necessary for the impugners of the late change to suggest and to foster. And what, after all, are the grounds on which such imputations rest? Mr. Rowland Hill, says the Record, was a Director of a Railway which refused Return tickets extending from Saturday to Monday, and thus compelled its passengers to travel on the Sunday. [13a] Mr. Rowland Hill, says the Author of the Reply, is an officer of that department of the Government, which is notorious above all others for its desecration of the Sabbath: [13b] a department of the Government, we may add, so beyond all others unfortunate, that to it alone is denied the possibility of self-reformation, and every effort after amendment is branded by anticipation as hypocrisy and imposture.