The Sabbath, the Crystal Palace, and the People

by James Baldwin Brown

The question to be considered in the following pages is this:—“Is it wise and right for us, as Christians, to offer any opposition to the opening of the Crystal Palace during a portion of the Lord’s day?” I trust that all into whose hands this may come, are of one mind as to the value and importance of the Sabbath. But there are those who take the negative on this question, who are as loyal to the Sabbath, as honestly desirous to have it better and more extensively observed, as the straitest of those who have set themselves forth as its special defenders. In making this clear, it will be needful to examine the views of the great parties who have expressed themselves against interference in this matter, but on grounds with which I cannot accord.

There are many who take no part in the protest of, at any rate, a large portion of the religious public, simply on the ground that an appeal to Government, on any subject involving religious principles and considerations, is undesirable in itself, and dangerous, inasmuch as it may be made the precedent for future interference, in some more serious form. Gallio is their model ruler, a man “who cared for none of these things.” They hold that the State should have no thought and no voice on such matters. That such a movement as that of the Crystal Palace Company may safely be left to stand or fall by its own merits. If it be good, they are sure it will come to something; if bad, they have a happy faith that it will come to nought. No doubt, such theories have a strong intrenchment in the order of a ruling Providence. Somehow, good things do live, bad things do die, notwithstanding man’s efforts to the contrary; but still, bad things are long a-dying, and God expects us all—rulers, too, according to the measure of their rule—to help to end them, and get them decently buried out of sight. Had there been a petition to Government to open all the beer-shops in the kingdom all day and all night on the Sabbath, and the Government said yea, should we dare to sit calmly by, and trust that the evil would cure itself? Is it not the business of Government to help to protect, by governmental effort and action, the whole community from the effects of the worst passions and most degrading views of the community? Though, no doubt, the highest condition of a State is that in which a healthy, moral, public feeling renders such interference needless. We have hardly yet arrived at this Utopia of politics, and this excessive jealousy of Government, in the present condition of England, obstructs many useful measures. The objection to Government expressing itself on this subject seems to be a radically unsound one. The question must be discussed on quite other principles, if a healthy settlement of it is to be made.

There is a second party, which refuses to join in the protest through indifference to the Sabbath, or latitudinarian views of its nature and claims. To them, the Sabbath appears to be simply a human institution; a thing invented by priests for priestly purposes; an enslavement of man’s free spirit; a formalism which mars the pure essence of devotion, makes it a thing of times and seasons, and desecrates every other day that it may consecrate one. “Every day is a Sabbath,” according to this doctrine; to attach holiness to any particular day, is to rob all the rest of the holiness which belongs to them. To tell a man that he can worship best in sanctuaries in Sabbath seasons, is to fetter his right and liberty of worship at all times and places; and, in short, the Sabbath is regarded as the very key-stone of that arch of formalism on which the Church rears the superstructure of her power. Such is the latitudinarian view of the Sabbath; and, of course, those who hold it, rejoice in the prospect of the opening of the Crystal Palace on that day. In order to discern the falseness of their views, we must glance at the true idea of the Christian Sabbath.

Of all the popular cants of the day, perhaps that is at once the most pretentious, and the most heartless, which asserts a necessary antagonism between form and spirit, soul and body, the spiritual and the material, and sets itself up as the special champion of spirit and the spiritual, by maintaining that all forms and organizations, all times and seasons, all modes and habitudes, are systematic conspiracies against the liberties and rights of men. This is the latest resurrection of the old ascetic spirit, and must end—as all attempts to emancipate ourselves from the conditions of life and development which God has implied in the constitution of our being and of all things—have ended, in blank immorality and shameless denial of all moral law. This is the great danger of our times. It is not formalism that we have chiefly to fear. There is more peril of our casting off all form and order, than of our being mastered and bound by any one. The Sabbath is of God. He who causeth the outgoing of the morning and evening to rejoice, causeth the outgoing of the Sabbath morning to rejoice over the human world. He who gives to the weary body the refreshment of nightly slumber, gives to the weary mind and spirit the rest of the Sabbath day. We may steal the hours from slumber, but the wrong will in the end avenge itself; and it is at our peril, and to our certain detriment as men, societies, or nations, that we steal its offices from the Sabbath. The moon, the fairest and the benignest minister that attends our earth, marks out our weeks for us. She chimes with notes of silvery clearness the sevens, while the sun intones the units on the bells of time. In full tune with living nature we keep our Sabbaths. We enter into the universal harmony when we consecrate our seventh day. This surface analogy rests on the deepest principles; and if, to any, this orderly procession of the Sabbaths seem a formalism, a yoke of bondage, then the day, the night, the periodic mealtime, the Christmas festival, the birthday greeting, must be to them a torment and an insult. The arrangements of all things must be, to such, a maddening discord. Even the primitive simplicities of barbaric existence, if they could recur to it, would not emancipate them. But such an experience might, perhaps, convince them, that these consecrations are the records of a vital progress—that these seasons, cut off from the lump of untrained, untrimmed, unformed existence, are the string courses of the masonry of that living temple of society, which mark the lines of its emergence from the dark ocean of primitive barbaric chaos and night.

A tendency to think lightly of what has been consecrated by the religious feeling of the pious for long generations, is by no means a beautiful or commendable thing. We may be sure that some deep reason underlies the disposition of pious minds with one consent, through successive ages, to fall into a certain form or mode of action and thought. God has other ways of giving to the world commandments than by speaking or writing them. It is as distinctly a command of God to us to work by day and sleep by night, as if it had been written on the tables of stone; and any organized attempt to violate it exacts the penalties of a broken command. And God has given to all men an implicit direction to observe a Sabbath, in the instinct of its need which he has implanted in the constitution of humanity. This is witnessed even among the most degraded peoples, who have wandered farthest from the first condition, and most injured the original constitution, by means of the miserable substitutes wherewith they are fain to supply its place. But the question might fairly be asked here—“Is this all the obligation of the Sabbath day? Is it simply, that as sleep is good for the body every night, so it is good for man that, once in seven days, he should rest from his labours? If this be all, where is the religious obligation of the Sabbath?” No, this is not all. When we speak of a man resting from his labours, we speak of a man’s rest, and not of a brute’s. A brute rests from toil that he may renew the tension of his muscles; a man, that he may renew the tension of his soul. A man’s work is not the work of his muscles only, nor is a man’s life the life of a labourer, of a student, of a priest, but all these in unison. And when God said, “Thou shalt rest on the seventh day from all thy work,” he said it to man—to a being endowed with a spirit capable of “looking before and after,” capable of looking up to Him, whose natural and joyful employment, on his rest-days, should be to refresh his higher powers, by special direction of them to their appropriate objects, lest he should become embruted by his needful daily toil. We cannot separate, even in thought, when we look at it in relation to God, between the rest of the Sabbath and spiritual activity and devotion. The fact, that it is a man for whom God provides the Sabbath, seems to indicate the kind of use which is to be made of it. The man who deliberately holds himself back from a high exercise, of which God has made him capable, and prefers to make his Sabbath more like a brute’s than a man’s, commits, in relation to it, that most heavy of transgressions, “a coming short of the glory of God.” There is a sin which no written law can touch—an inward sin, a sin of life, which consists in living below the idea which God has implanted; a sin which may co-exist with the most perfect legal righteousness, and which can only be denominated “a coming short of the glory of God.” Human rulers may separate in their legislation between the rest and the religious purpose of the Sabbath; they may say, “The first we will care for, it is within our province; the second we can take no cognizance of by formal statutes;” but the Divine Ruler can make no such separation. To rest from toil, and to restrain the thoughts and the heart from going out through His creation and up to Him, is to commit that sin against Him which the Apostle specifies as the fundamental transgression—a coming short of His glory. You see that it is a sin which may be committed in churches and chapels, as well as in parlours, in Parks, in Crystal Palaces, and on sea beaches. I fear, the Sabbath is not to any of us what it ought to be, in the measure in which it ought to be—a season of inward renewing of strength for daily labour—a height to which God affords us leisure and strength to climb, that we may look beyond the stars which watch our daily travail, to Him.

Thus far we have hardly glanced at the Sabbath as a positive institution of the Lawgiver and Ruler of this world. The view of the Sabbath which has already been presented, seems to underlie all Divine legislation (and there is such) upon the subject. This is the foundation on which it rests, towards the realization of this it works. We miss much of the meaning of the old Jewish legislation, by not going deep down beneath the positive commandment, and studying, as we are able—nay, if friends of Christ, bound to do—the necessity out of which the law arises, the feature of the original Divine constitution which it is intended to illustrate and guard. This method will bring us into true tune with the commandment, our observance will then be spiritual, that of a friend, a child, not a slave. Every law must have its reason in the nature of things, must be intended to direct attention to, vindicate, or restore, some reality which is in danger of being disregarded. It is needful to see what is behind the law, in order to understand it truly. God saw that there was in man a fearful tendency to deny the God that made him, by withholding himself from the higher exercises, the higher life, of which God made him capable—getting rid of spiritual burden and care, and making his life as much like a brute’s as it could possibly become. He saw, moreover, that the struggle between the higher element and the lower, the spirit and the flesh, which had broken loose from the spirit’s control, would be a long and sharp one, in each human soul, and in the world at large; and, tenderly compassionating his afflicted and distracted prodigal children, He came, even in the very hour of their apostacy, to help the higher nature in its conflicts, and finally give to it the victory by allying it for ever with himself. His purpose of mercy had a methodic development—first the germ, then the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear. He chose Abraham as the man through whom He would enter into relations with his descendants, the Jewish people, constituting them the people through whom He would enter into relations with the whole human world. He gave to the Jews a law, the purpose of which was to bring out the original features of the constitution of man, and his primal relations to God and to all things. That which had been lost in the fall was re-established by the Jewish economy, and every ordinance of God, which man, the sinner, had trampled upon and spurned, was brought forth again, and sealed afresh, in the sight of all the people, and, through history, in the sight of all men, with the seal of the Almighty and the All-wise. The Jews, in this solemn covenant, were the representative people, through whom God was addressing the whole human race. It was, above all things needful, to bring out the idea that there was power to support the original constitution of things, though man had been suffered to attempt, for a time, at any rate, to violate it. God needed to bear most solemn witness before men, that no violation of it could be successful; that it was girded with the living splendour of His righteousness, and sustained by the terrible resources of His power. This, man had forgotten. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” said one, in wanton contempt of the law of that relationship of brotherhood which had been established by God. “These be thy gods,” said others, as they danced around their golden calf, and, under the very shadow of Sinai, made light of the living Lord. Men were growing wanton in the unbounded license to sin, to break every Divine command without immediate and palpable penalty. God had to tell this people, and through them the world, with a terrible simplicity and sternness which even they could understand, that an awful sanction attended the original unwritten laws which He had established, and that the penalty of a systematic breach of them must be death. Let us take the legislation on the Sabbath as a specimen.

The law is written thus, Exodus xx. 8, 9, 10, 11:—“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy 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 Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” The comment on it is given in Exodus xxxi. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17:—“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, Verily, my Sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you. Ye shall keep the Sabbath, therefore; for it is holy unto you: every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death: for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people. Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord: whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.” It has been said that this is a too tremendous sanction to a mere formal institution. We have seen that this is not a mere formal institution, a day appointed arbitrarily by the Lawgiver, as for wise reasons our lawgivers appoint days and seasons upon earth. It is a part of the original constitution, a beam through the gloom of the first sentence, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread;” a station for man the wayfarer to rest and refresh himself, as he ploughs and digs, and fights and forces his way through the jungle of earth to God. God, in this Sabbath institution, is bringing out a fundamental and primal law, and He gives to it the very highest sanction, a witness to all fundamental laws that the breach of them is death. That God did not regard it as a mere formal institution is most evident, in that He himself protests against the mere form of it, when it was offered to him as a sacrifice widowed of the congenital soul. Isaiah i. 13–15. “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” The Sabbath of the Jews was a perennial monitor, pointing backwards to the earliest time. “Remember the Sabbath day,” remember the fountain of present and familiar liberties and joys. The time came when the alphabet of morals had been conned and thoroughly mastered, when the whole world was to be put into possession of treasure which had been accumulating in the hands of the Jews for ages. It is a fine illustration of the manner in which Judaism in its living germs, which had never been suffered to perish, expanded into Christianity, to trace the transition from the Jewish Sabbath to the Sabbath of the Christian church. It is more true, perhaps, to speak of growth than transition.

It seems very strange to some that a feature of Judaism so strongly marked, has so little formal recognition and reinforcement in the New Testament. What is the foundation of the Christian Sabbath? On what ground of reason or of law does it rest? Of law, none whatever. To the Pharisees, the men who sat in Moses’ seat, Christ appeared to be a Sabbath breaker. Whatever His estimation of it, His conduct with regard to it was such, that it could at any rate be said, with a colour of truth, “This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the Sabbath day.” On every occasion on which there is a question on the subject, Christ appears in strong antagonism to the Churchmen of his time; and on one occasion he defends himself by an appeal to an irregularity of David, which he justified on the ground of necessity; a mode of defence which must have greatly surprised them, which surprise he takes no pains to mitigate. And yet, mark you, he never allowed that he violated the spirit of the Sabbath institution; nay, he charged the rigid Sabbatarians with the violation, giving them a new lesson to learn—“Go ye, and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” For the rest, we have to gather the Sabbath law out of the New Testament in the following fashion:—

On the first day of the week, the Saviour arose from the dead, and laid the foundation of a new creation. On the first day of the week, Jesus appeared to his disciples, (John xx. 19 and 26.) On the first day of the week, the Apostles were baptized with tongues of fire. On the first day of the week, the disciples came together to break bread at Troas, (Acts xx. 7.) On this day Paul thinks a work of charity specially graceful and appropriate, (1 Cor. xvi. 2.) There is little doubt, but no decisive evidence, that the assemblies of Christians alluded to “passim” in the Epistles, are to be referred to this day; and John, in Patmos, “was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” As far as the New Testament is concerned, we believe that this is all. Some, then, might say that it is simply by implication and inference, and not by distinct commandment, that the Church keeps a Sabbath. The Jewish Sabbath, with all its awful sanctions, vanishes, and no one can quote any law of the New Testament which sets up anything in its place. No one can show by what authority the day was altered, nor tell how far the authority, which changed the day, could transfer the sanctions and penalties from the old day to the new. In mere word, this is true enough. It is untrue enough, at heart. How does the Sabbath come down to us? As a day set apart, through all Christian ages, by the deliberate consecration of the whole Catholic church from apostolic times. We must not rail too much at tradition. The Lord’s day is certainly more a tradition than a commandment. And what, in the Christian church, is the office of the Spirit in relation to Divine things, and, among them, Divine laws? Is it not the office of the Spirit to lead men to see from within the wisdom and goodness of the commandment, and lovingly to adopt it; showing to the soul of man the wisdom of the Divine constitution in everything, and securing, not a formal, but a loving adhesion to it; abandoning entirely the system of formal prohibitions and penalties, as inconsistent with the method of grace and of love? Does the absence of a Divine testimony against theft or adultery, in Christ’s epitome of the commandments, legalize theft or adultery? And does the absence of a renewed formal announcement of the original Divine provision for man—the Sabbath-day—mean that God ceases to care for it, that He annuls the first constitution, and leaves man to work on till death like a brute? On the contrary, it means that the Spirit of God, and not the law, has taken charge of the institution, and that He will make its power felt and its worth acknowledged, wherever He bears witness within human souls. But it is a very terrible sin to take it out of His charge, and make it law again, by presenting it in any other way than He presented it to the early Christian world. Has not the Lord’s day come down to us just as we should have anticipated—through the Spirit? Was there not a deep reason beneath the old institution, Exodus xxxi. 17—“It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He rested, and was refreshed.” Is there not as deep a reason underneath the new? Is it not the Lord’s day? The Jewish day commemorated a creation complete; the Christian Sabbath, a creation begun. The one a last day—the finishing of a work—looking backwards to the original condition and constitution; the other a first day, with the week days, the ages, the eternities before it, commemorating a new condition and constitution, or the old one transfigured, to bear fruit through a future eternity. For myself, I would handle as reverently the Lord’s day which the Spirit has delivered to us through the Church, as the Jew his Sabbath, protected by the penalties of the law. Only, as Christians, we are bound to go further back than the Jew could go, dared go, even beneath and behind the commandment, and enter into the counsels of Him who gave to us the Sabbath day. We are to regard the purpose and spirit of the Sabbath. A man who goes to church twice and worships, and thinks that therein he has fulfilled the law of the Sabbath, and brands him as a law-breaker ipso facto who has never been to church at all, fearfully misunderstands the matter. The thing is good; its goodness is now its argument; and that observance which is not in full tune with its goodness, may be worth much before men, but is worth nothing before God. A father who has children at home, in early years compels them by law to join the family circle, and observe the laws and orders of the house. When they are full grown, he tries to make the home attractive, and leaves it to the sense of duty, love, and pleasure, to work conformity. This Christian view of the Sabbath is the very opposite of that which makes every day a Sabbath, and dishonours the one. The endeavour to realize every day a Sabbath feeling, if genuine and constant, will add fresh value to the Sabbath of refreshment and repose; while a disposition to slight the Lord’s day, on the pretext of keeping all days holy, will end in exhausting life of its spiritual element, and destroying the very soul of man’s work.

Having laid down these principles with regard to the Christian Sabbath, in refutation of the rationalistic argument, let us proceed to the practical application of them to the matter in hand. The case is just this. An institution is about to be formed and an exhibition opened, which must be regarded as the legitimate fruit of the forty years’ peace which that stern warrior conquered for us, whom we have just attended with befitting splendour to his burial, whose mourners were a million and a half of men. The Crystal Palace of last year was its direct result—the World’s Great Show—the Jubilee of Commerce, celebrated with festal pomp in London—the heart of the body commercial—whence also had gone forth, forty years ago, the head and the hands which had torn the troubler of the world’s peace from his throne, and inaugurated the new era. England gained the victory, and at the end of a long generation, unparalleled for activity and enterprise in the history of man, she called the world to her capital to see and to taste the fruits. Her grey old warrior was spared to see it. The peaceful pageant of commerce passed by him and did him homage, and then he was taken to his rest. It is surely remarkable, that Wellington was spared to see the crown of his labours—the fruit of generations of peaceful activities, which will be marked in history by his name—and then was removed before the event was consummated which may cost the world another struggle, and the blood of her bravest men. Such was the Crystal Palace of 1851.