I wish from my heart that I could believe that the object of that gentleman was the glory of our God and Saviour in the promotion of His worship, and the saving work of the Gospel.
But it requires a mind above or below humanity to believe, that a man truly desires and seeks the glory of God, who consents to occupy such a post in the one department of our Government, which is most conspicuous for its desecration of the Lord’s-day, and its contempt of the claims of the Gospel.
You seem, however, to limit your attention to the one document before you. But, for my part, if I could detach my mind from previous events, and take up this single paper for judgment, I confess that I should be totally unable to comprehend the connexion between the measures contemplated and the care for the observance of the Lord’s-day, which is put so prominently forward; and I should necessarily suspect, either that the writer had in his mind a very strange jumble of heterogeneous subjects, or that there was some underhand motive for his curious preface to the document.
I cannot, however, forget that this minute comes out at the close of a long series of earnest appeals to the Government for the removal or diminution of Sunday labor in the Post Office; that the duty of such reform has been urged by numbers, which could not be neglected, and by individuals, whose rank and station made some satisfactory effort, if not some concession, imperative upon the authorities. Promises have long been held out of such changes as, it was hoped (so they told us) would meet the wishes of the Christian remonstrants. And this minute is not the spontaneous act of piety which you suppose, but the evasive reply to the urgent and often repeated remonstrances of tens of thousands of thoughtful Christian men, and men deeply interested in the prosperity of the country. Instead of boasting of the “total suspension of all money orders on the Sabbath,” it would be wiser and more becoming to endeavour to forget that disgraceful matter for ever.
It was not only an outrage of the Divine law, it was an insult on a Christian community, that when every bank and office was closed, and a respectable tradesman would have been ashamed to look for gain on the Lord’s-day, the one place open in every town for petty traffic should be the Government office of the British Empire.
The offence was totally unnecessary, and every respectable man was ashamed of it. And one cannot but smile at the pretty simplicity with which Mr. Rowland Hill informs us that “it is very satisfactory to remark that neither the announcement of the change, nor the experience of it thus far, has brought on the department a single complaint from the public.” [18]
It is not necessary to go through the details of “the minute,” nor to notice the fallacies, which have exposed themselves already in the experiment. The writer of that paper could not have been so ignorant of Post Office work as to suppose that twenty-five persons would accomplish all that was contemplated in London; nor had he any ground for promising any relief in the provinces worthy of the name. It rather seems that in his haste to attain to his ultimate object, he was peculiarly incautious as to the statement of minor details.
What that object really is may easily be conjectured from a review of the past. “This is,” as you remark, “a part of a more general scheme.”
For years past a strong body of serious men have combated the Post Office desecration of the Lord’s-day, and their efforts have been firmly resisted by those in authority, with a few honourable exceptions.
In that contest the strong argument of the advocates for a cessation of Post Office work has been the closed office in London; and those who have defended the profanation of that day have never been able to get over that great and unanswerable argument. The office in London has been considered as uniformly at rest, and always spoken of as such by both parties, the slight exceptions being not of a nature to be cited honestly against that position.