A Reply to Dr. Vaughan's "Letter on the Late Post-Office Agitation"

by James Roberts Pears

You cannot go into your closet, and meet the God of your salvation there, with an offer of a lesser sin instead of a greater. You shudder at the thought, or smile at the absurdity, as your temper may be; but this is merely the specious profession of Mr. Hill’s minute, as adopted by yourself, stripped under the light of Divine truth.

You have yourself spoken with approbation of those in whom is “a trembling anxiety to be right for eternity, which forbids them to rest in that dim unrealized twilight which satisfies the eye less intently fixed on the future and the spiritual.” [7a] And if these words are anything beyond an elegant close to a period, you will agree with me, that it is a fearful calamity for a teacher of God’s truth to have vague and indefinite notions of duty towards God; and an awful offence in such a man to consent to and to authorize the prevalence of such uncertainty.

Man, when once brought to a sense of responsibility, is too ready to escape from it under the cloudy varieties of opinion. The poor country labourer defends his carelessness by asserting that “we must do the best that we can;” and his educated fellow-man tells us that “the question is whether, on the whole, the aggregate of gain or loss will preponderate.” [7b] No, Sir, that may be the question for Mr. Rowland Hill; but it is not the question for you or me. I earnestly entreat you to consider this matter again. The elegant poet of a heathen court declared of the virtuous man, which his imagination delighted in, “Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinæ.” We have repeated, as before God, thousands of times, “Thy will be done.” And what did we mean? Less than Horace? I trust not. “Thy will be done;”—though all the conveniences of society are sacrificed,—all the communications of friends cut off,—all the prosperity of nations overthrown:—“Thy will be done.”

“If twenty-five additional servants are required in the London Office on the Sunday, and twice twenty-five can be relieved on that day in the Provincial Offices, the change, so far as it extends, is salutary. Now if this obvious principle be granted, the question is decided at once,” [8] is your own statement of the matter; and though I utterly deny that such a relief can be realized, or was expected, I am willing to take it as a mere moral thesis of your own, that I may remind you that very obvious principles in the matters of this world are not very obvious principles in our dealing with God.

You dare not go into the presence of God with this obvious principle in the face of His express and unqualified command. You tell me that “it is necessary to take a national view of such a question.” I answer, that for us, Ministers of the Gospel, it is necessary to take a scriptural and spiritual view of this and every question. And you must not suppose that I am assuming anything here as to the obligation of the Lord’s-day. You admit that the increase of work in the London Post Office is an evil, and you look upon the relief from such work in the country offices as a counterbalancing good. As a minister of Christ, you must mean good and evil in reference to the will of the God of the Bible; you must therefore understand positive, eternal, unchangeable good and evil. You incur a vast and fearful responsibility if you teach man that man’s obedience, in regard to Divine declarations of good and evil, is left undefined, and dependent upon circumstances, or man’s judgment. You must not teach them to seek a good of their own by a balance of disobedience and obedience, and such an approximation to the Divine will as they find convenient.

Of all the forms in which the perverseness of man’s nature is exhibited, none is so painful to contemplate as the incapacity of an acute intellect and cultivated mind for comprehending the nature and power of the communication between the Creator and the spirits of His creatures. We read the clearest statements of the one truth that “the world by wisdom knew not God,” and we submit to them rather as a salutary warning against possible error, than as declaratory of a sure result. But when we see the truth exemplified in an individual; when we look upon faculties and qualities which we are led to envy, to admire, and to love, and find the man even in one point closed against the communication of God; our spirit endures the most bitter disappointment of which it is susceptible. We see strength which defies our efforts, and a moral and intellectual position above our reach, and yet feel that such strength is the intensity of weakness, and such a position the most slippery of those “slippery places,” of which the Psalmist was instructed in the sanctuary of God.

Few years have passed since we rejoiced in the emancipation of minds from the thraldom of the traditionary ideas of the past; men began, after a long interval, to think for themselves. We have already lived to see many of the finest minds lost through their liberty. It is better to be limited to the well defined truths borrowed from other minds, than to wander in a wilderness of free thought, where truth and error, good and evil, are undistinguished but by the casual intuitive perception of the wanderer.

It is a matter of vast national importance that one of the first instructors of youth should subdue his own mind to well defined conceptions of duty.

Surely there must have been something which materially interfered with the calmness of your judgment when you stated conspicuously that the alteration in the transmission of letters would cause a great diminution of the former amount of letters written and read in the country on Sunday! And when you intimated that the opponents of the measure, who will not consent to the doing of evil that good may come, are chargeable with the same folly. You ask, “Are you not, in resisting the proposed relief of the country offices, on the plea of regard for that of London, doing, in fact, a great evil—not that a small good may come; but that a small evil may not come?” [10]

Whence did you learn, Sir, that we resist the proposed relief of the Country Offices, for which we have contended for years? Who told you that we dared impiously to resist any act of obedience to the Lord? Nothing could be further from my mind. Many of us, as I can venture to assert, whether right or wrong in our judgment, have a clear, defined, invariable rule of obedience to the will of God, by which we desire to be guided, and desire others also to be ruled, as the best wish we can express for them.