OBSERVANCE OF THE SABBATH.
Owen, perhaps, was more strict in his views of Sabbath observance than Baxter; yet he spoke of its being no small mistake that men have laboured more to multiply directions about external duties than to direct a due sanctification of the day according to the spirit and genius of Gospel obedience; and he did not deny that some, measuring others by themselves, tied people up unto such long tiresome duties, and rigid abstinences from refreshments, as clogged their minds, and turned the whole service of the day into a wearisome bodily exercise which profiteth little.[346]
Between Puritans and Anglicans a great difference continued upon the Sunday question. Jeremy Taylor, speaking of persons who objected to have meat dressed upon the Lord’s Day, or to use an innocent, permitted recreation, says—“When such an opinion makes a sect, and this sect gets firm, confident, and zealous defenders, in a little time it will dwell upon the conscience as if it were a native there, whereas it is but a pitiful inmate, and ought to be turned out of doors.”[347] Thorndike denied the obligation of the Fourth Commandment upon any but the Jewish people; he based the authority for the Lord’s Day on the Apostolic custom of the Church, and he disapproved of the Sabbatarian strictness of the Puritans.[348] Sanderson pleaded for recreations, “walking and discoursing” for “men of liberal education;” but for the “ruder sort of people,” “shooting, leaping, pitching the bar, and stool-ball,” rather than “dicing and carding.” “These pastimes,” he said, were to be used “in godly and commendable sort,” with great moderation, at seasonable times, not during Divine service, nor at hours appointed by the master of the house for private devotion, but so as to make men fitter for God’s service during the rest of the day, and all this was to be done, not doubtingly, for whatsoever is not of faith is sin; nor uncharitably, for in this, “as in all indifferent things, a wise and charitable man will, in godly wisdom, deny himself many times the use of that liberty, which, in a godly charity, he dare not deny to his brother.”[349] Although the Book of Sports had lost its authority, its spirit revived after the Restoration, and amusements in accordance with its provisions were encouraged, in some cases, without any checks or any religious teaching of the kind adopted by Sanderson. Cosin, indeed, in a sermon upon Sunday observance, quotes a remark by Augustine, which condemns all vain and idle pastimes—“Some people keep holy day for the devil, and not for God, and should be better employed, labouring and ploughing in their fields, than so to spend the day in idleness and vanity, and women should better bestow their time in spinning of wool, than upon the Lord’s Day to lose their time leaping and dancing, and other such wantonness.”[350] Borough magistrates enforced the observance of the Sabbath; not only were corporations, attired in their gowns, required to attend church, morning and afternoon, but all masters were ordered to cause their apprentices to be at Divine service at the same time.[351] In the houses of such as disliked Puritanism, scenes of levity, if not dissipation, often desecrated the holy hours. After attendance at church, time was spent in a manner at variance with the previous devotions.
RECREATIONS.
Pious Anglicans after the Restoration loved the first day of the week with all the fervour of George Herbert;—and what some of them said with reference to recreations, shocking as it appeared to Puritans, proceeded not from a desire of self-indulgence, but from a consideration of weakness in other people,—still, the Sabbath remained the Puritans’ peculiar treasure. They put on it the highest price. To them it seemed the jewel and crown, the bloom and flower of the week, the torch which lighted up its dark days, the sunshine which from eternity streamed down on the waters of time. Unwisdom, sinking into superstition, betrayed itself in the strictness of their conduct, provoking ridicule, and producing reaction; but it should not be overlooked that it was from their great love to the festival, that they were so careful to frame rules for its preservation. Some treated Puritan habits as pitiable, and regarded the men as insanely melancholy, but the latter esteemed themselves objects for envy rather than commiseration, since in their own hearts they made the Sabbath “a delight, the holy of the Lord, and honourable.”
XI. The idea of “a Christian year,” a sanctification of the seasons of nature by Gospel memories, is undeniably beautiful. This theory of time, adopted by the Church of England, reappeared at the Revolution, and days which mark the progress of the old earth’s journeys round the sun were stamped anew with sacred names, and entwined with the history of the Redeemer and His Apostles. Christmas celebrated the Incarnation, and Epiphany the infant appearance of Jesus to the Magi at Bethlehem, with subsequent manifestations of His glory; Lent was the spring period, set apart for fasting and prayer, preparatory to the commemoration of Divine mercy in the atonement of Christ. Palm Sunday is not recognized in the English Prayer Book. On the Sunday before Easter no reference occurs to our Lord’s entrance into Jerusalem in the proper Lessons, the Epistle, or the Gospel. But Easter itself, after the sorrows of Good Friday, is a high and holy festival, when the Church breaks out into songs of joy because of the Resurrection of her Lord. At the close of the forty days following, come Rogation Week, with Holy Thursday, and then Whitsuntide—a season associated with Christ’s Ascension, and culminating in the celebration of Pentecost. Trinity Sunday crowns the whole, and invites the faithful to contemplate the comprehensive, the fundamental, the mysterious doctrine of a distinction in the Godhead. The character and history of St. John the Baptist, and of the Apostles, St. Matthias, St. Peter, St. James, St. Bartholomew, St. Matthew, St. Simon and St. Jude, St. Andrew, St. Thomas, are in succession bound up with certain days, the series terminating in the festival of All Saints.[352]
RECREATIONS.
With these seasons, observed from ancient times, various recreations had become connected in the middle ages. Many of them survived the fall of Popery, and with exceptions and changes, came once more, at the Restoration, into general fashion and indulgence. To say the least, they brought around sacred things the strangest and most incongruous associations. Some, indeed, were very much worse than strange and incongruous. Christmas Eve shone with the blaze of the Yule log, and its bountiful accompaniments of good cheer. The Christmas carol echoed through the family hall with gay music from the minstrels’ gallery. The Christmas hobby-horse cut strange capers, and Christmas-boxes were given freely to young and old. The Lord of misrule, the foot plough, and the sword dance, Yule doughs, mince-pies, Christmas-pies and plum-puddings added to the tide of fellowship and pleasure at that mid-winter season. All the glories of Twelfth night, which threw old men and old women, as well as little children, into ecstasies of merriment, were engrafted on the feast of Epiphany. Easter holidays, Easter liftings, Easter eggs, and all sorts of Easter fun, gathered in strange, grotesque, often revolting, contrast round the professed acknowledgment of the greatest of the redemptive miracles of Christianity. Rogation Week, with Ascension Day in its centre, had long been the chosen time for sacred processions and litanies, and now again in England, on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of that week, parochial perambulations revived; charity children carried flowers; the clergy with singing men and boys, all in sacred vestments, and with churchwardens and parishioners, beat the bounds of the parish, and under Gospel oaks, and other Gospel trees, the Incumbent read the Gospel, according to an old custom, in which had originated these familiar appellations. The idea of such perambulations, sanctioned by the Church, was—that processional worship should be offered to the Almighty, that thanks should be given to Him for the promise of a good crop, or that prayer should be offered for His mercy on the prospect of a bad harvest. But the gathering together of all sorts of idle people, and the habit of drinking which obtained amongst them, led to most deplorable excesses.
Superstitious and absurd practices cropped up profusely on St. Mark’s Eve. With St. John’s Day was coupled the use, in decoration, of the birch, the lily, and St. John’s wort, and at night bonfires illuminated the villages of “Merrie England.” St. Peter’s Day had similar illuminations; St. James’ Day was a time for eating oysters, and Allhallow Even was devoted to nut-cracking, apple-catching, and the ancient game of quintain. The feasts of the consecration of churches degenerated into rush bearings, hoppings, and all kinds of rustic amusements, in which, as Bishop Hall observed in his Triumph of Pleasure “you may well say no Greek can be merrier than they.”
The theory was to unite the remembrance of Christian facts and Christian names with particular seasons in the lives of men, to interlink religion with social intercourse, to recognize recreation as a human necessity, to hallow it with Christian influences, and to allow joy, on account of the events recorded in the Gospel, to express itself in innocent festivities. But nobody can fail to see that if this was the theory, the practice did not correspond with it, for the history of the amusements common in England at these festivals after the Restoration, as before, abounds in proofs of revelry and riot, most unseemly in the estimation of sober Christians. A distinction ought to be made between the use of festivities at Christmas, Easter, and other seasons, and their abuse; between what is harmful and what is innocent; and also it must be allowed that, whilst Churchmen, in the days of which we speak, mingled recreation with religion, some of them also mingled the spirit of religion with recreation, and condemned all vicious indulgence; but the fact still remains, that amongst the lower classes, and the upper as well, in cities and towns, and in rural districts, a large amount of social demoralization existed under the cover of Christian symbols, and in union with professedly Christian observances. This fact should not be overlooked in an Ecclesiastical History of England.