and I object (I think with reason) to giving up mine to his charge. I want a keg of beer in my cellar, or, it may be, a basket of champagne. Because he is virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale? Shall his being scandalized because I think proper to take a walk on Sunday confine me all that day to the house? Must his scruples of conscience prevent myself and family from entertaining our friends on Sunday? In short, must I always be on tenterhooks to know how his conscience regards every act of mine on that day? It would seem, though, as if that were just what my neighbor and his atrabilious friends have been aiming at. For, now that I think of it, they have been since ever I remember the self-same people, who have all along got up meetings, been active in urging petitions, and done their utmost to thwart every convenience or facility that for the past twenty-five years has been contrived for public accommodation on Sunday.
On further reflection, they are the identical individuals who have publicly and privately been marplots in every matter in our vicinage, during the same length of time, which did not fully recognize their little Ebenezer or Bethel as its fount and origin; and though they are possibly not to be convinced, yet it is highly important for these people and all their class to learn once for all that the days of Puritanism are gone, and that nowadays every man is responsible for his own acts to his Creator, and not to Mr. Jones next door, nor to the congregation with which he worships. We do not wish Mr. J—— to read his letters on Sunday, nor will we force him to patronize the street-car on that or
any other day; but we want him and his friends to cease from making laws that interfere with our freedom, while thrusting upon them nothing which, willy nilly, they are bound to accept.
Thus it will be seen that our objection is not to our friends of the various illiberal “schemes of salvation” as individuals, nor to their practice of a peculiar and, to us, by no means an alluring primness of speech and gait on Sunday; but to their unwillingness to allow us, who see things differently, to follow our own convictions, and to their manifest determination that we shall, in the event of their ever having the power, be forced to adapt ourselves to their views and practices. This overbearing spirit seems to be inseparable from their pharisaic practice and its resultant prejudices, so that our dislike to both is well founded. As to the sanctification of the Lord’s day, they have an indisputable right to celebrate it just as austerely as may best suit them, though we think them grossly and foolishly wrong therein. They may call the day Sabbath, if they please, though we know that word to signify Saturday, and nothing else. But in return for this (not concession, for it is their right) we wish to suggest mildly that we also have certain inalienable rights; that among these, according to a highly-respectable and much-lauded document of which we sometimes hear, “are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and we modestly venture the additional suggestion that the municipal and other laws which already exist, and those which these people would fain enact, touching an enforced observance of the Sunday after their fashion, interfere largely with our just liberty and militate strongly against
our chances of success in the pursuit of happiness.
Finally, which method of observing the day seems the more in accord with right reason? And here we wish the Protestant to lay aside a moment, if he can, the prejudice engendered by the tyranny of early education, surrounding usage, and personal habit. Our having been accustomed from early youth to a specific article of diet, clothing, or to a habit of any kind, physical or mental, does not necessarily make an entirely different usage wrong or the direct reverse sinful. If it be a command of God that Sunday shall be observed after the fashion of the ancient Jews with their Sabbath, we have nothing to say, except that even then we object to its observance being made a matter of legal enactment. No man was ever yet driven to the Almighty by fear of temporal pains and penalties; nor is any worship acceptable to our Creator unless it be a free-will offering of the heart. But when Protestants admit with us that the Mosaic dispensation is past and the type done away with in the fulness of that which it prefigured, we certainly cannot consider the law of the Pentateuch any more binding upon us in this respect than in regard to the rite of circumcision, the usage of polygamy, or the obligation of a brother to marry his deceased brother’s wife. But there is, in the New Testament, no warrant at all for the change of the day, much less any rule for its special observance; and consequently, on Protestant principles, any day in the week—indeed, any one in ten days, a fortnight, or a month—would answer the purposes of religion equally well; and as there is no Scriptural command, the mode of
observance is purely of human invention.
We of course do not speak here of the Sunday, or of any one day in seven, employed (apart from religious purposes) solely for the purpose of recruiting the jaded physical energies of him who toils on the other six days in the week. The necessity for a periodical suspension of toil and labor depends on physical laws to which no reference is now made; and as the turmoil of trade and the competition of labor go on increasing, the necessity for the regular recurrence of a day of rest becomes more and more evident. The laboring classes are too numerous and too deeply interested in the preservation of the stated holiday for it ever to die out. In this view of the question—the purely physical one—the mode of observance would be simply a matter of discretion and utility, and would not come within the purview of the civil law at all; though the actual appointment of the day might, for the sake of uniformity and for many other reasons, very properly be considered as pertaining to government. We, however, speak of the day as a divine or an ecclesiastical institution, in which light its observance will depend upon the direct word of God or command of his church; but in no case will the civil law have any right to interfere either by dictum or permission.
But even supposing, for argument’s sake, what we by no means admit—viz., that the Sunday should be observed in accord with the prescriptions of the Pentateuch—we do not see how it follows that innocent and healthful recreation should be denied on that day, either to the young, for whom it is absolutely necessary, or to the middle-aged
and the old, to whom it is at least desirable. There is a great and palpable distinction between recreation and labor. The latter is forbidden on the Sabbath in the Decalogue; but does the former stand in the same case? The words are: “On it thou shalt not do any work.” It does not say: “On it thou shalt take no recreation, nor shalt thou play.” It is one thing to say to the hod-carrier or the navvy that he shall not mount the ladder with the heaped hod or ply the mattock and spade; and it is another and quite a different thing to say to either that he shall not take a walk in the suburbs, go with his family on an aquatic or rural excursion, or visit the “Exhibition buildings” on a Sunday. It is against such superstitious abuses, which had, in course of time, grown up on the authority of the sophistical Rabbins touching the Sabbath, that our Saviour so frequently and pointedly protests; and against the same or similar illiberal practices we now protest.