Spirit of Kant! have we not had enough
To make religion sad, and sour, and snubbish
But saints zoological must cant their stuff,
As vessels cant their ballast—rattling rubbish!
Once let the sect, triumphant to their text,
Shut Nero[2] up from Saturday till Monday,
And sure as fate they will deny us next
To see the dandelions on a Sunday—
But what is your opinion, Mrs. Grundy?
Note.—There is an anecdote of a Scotch Professor who happened during a Sunday walk to be hammering at a geological specimen which he had picked up, when a peasant gravely accosted him, and said, very seriously, “Eh! Sir, you think you are only breaking a stone, but you are breaking the Sabbath.”
In a similar spirit, some of our over-righteous sectarians are fond of attributing all breakage to the same cause—from the smashing of a parish lamp, up to the fracture of a human skull;—the “breaking into the bloody house of life,” or the breaking into a brick-built dwelling. They all originate in the breaking of the Sabbath. It is the source of every crime in the country—the parent of every illegitimate child in the parish. The picking of a pocket is ascribed to the picking of a daisy—the robbery on the highway to a stroll in the fields—the incendiary fire to a hot dinner—on Sunday. All other causes—the want of education—the want of moral culture—the want of bread itself, are totally repudiated. The criminal himself is made to confess at the gallows that he owes his appearance on the scaffold to a walk with “Sally in our alley” on the “day that comes between a Saturday and Monday.”
Supposing this theory to be correct, and made like the law “for every degree,” the wonder of Captain Macheath that we haven’t “better company at Tyburn tree” (now the New Drop) must be fully shared by everybody who has visited the Ring in Hyde Park on the day in question. But how much greater must be the wonder of any person who has happened to reside, like myself, for a year or two in a continental city, inhabited, according to the strict construction of our Mawworms, by some fifteen or twenty thousand of habitual Sabbath-breakers, and yet, without hearing of murder and robbery as often as of blood-sausages and dollars! A city where the Burgomaster himself must have come to a bad end, if a dance upon Sunday led so inevitably to a dance upon nothing!
The “saints” having set up this absolute dependence of crime on Sabbath-breaking, their relative proportions become a fair statistical question; and, as such, the inquiry is seriously recommended to the rigid legislator, who acknowledges, indeed, that the Sabbath was “made for man,” but, by a singular interpretation, conceives that the man for whom it was made is himself!
THE TURTLES.
A FABLE.
“The rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle.”—Byron.
