Title: The Sabbath, the Crystal Palace, and the People
Author: Brown, James Baldwin
Language: English
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AND THE PEOPLE***


Transcribed from the [1853?] Arthur Hall, Virtue, & Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org using scans from the British Library.

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                                   THE
                       SABBATH, THE CRYSTAL PALACE,
                             AND THE PEOPLE.


                                * * * * *

               “GO YE, AND LEARN WHAT THAT MEANETH, I WILL
                      HAVE MERCY AND NOT SACRIFICE.”

                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                        JAMES BALDWIN BROWN, A.B.,
                  MINISTER OF CLAYLANDS CHAPEL, LONDON.

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

                                 LONDON:
                       PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR, BY
               ARTHUR HALL, VIRTUE, & CO., PATERNOSTER ROW.
                                MDCCCLIII.

                            _Price Sixpence_.

                                * * * * *



THE SABBATH, THE CRYSTAL PALACE, AND THE PEOPLE.


THE relation between the Church of Christ and human society has long been
ill-defined and unsettled.  The Church has to present to society, in its
struggles and sufferings, an aspect in which the kindliness of human
sympathy and interest is blent with the severity of truth; and this is
always difficult.  Between worldly compliances on the one hand, and
bigoted formalities on the other, it is hard to strike the mean.  Between
the two extremes the Church is prone to alternate.  This question,—“The
opening of the Crystal Palace during a portion of the Lord’s Day,”
demands the statement of the feeling and thought of the Church upon this
subject at the present time.  The spirit of a party is quite as
significant as its acts and expressions, for that spirit is a living
fountain, out of which other acts and feelings will flow forth; and as
the utterance of the mind of the Church upon this great question will
probably determine the character of its relation to, and influence on
society for some years to come, we should watch most carefully, not over
our words and deeds only, but over the spirit in which we address
ourselves to this discussion.  We must be prepared either to reform or
re-affirm our first principles, as to the relation between the Church and
the human world—for this is, emphatically, a question of first
principles; it has been dealt with too much in detail; we must look to
the foundations if we would settle it aright.  Nor is it a matter of
merely casual and momentary importance to which party we attach
ourselves, and what cry we raise.  The party will do more work on us
personally than we shall do for the party.  It is possible (it has been
so before, it may be so again) that we may be taking for ourselves and
for the Church many backward steps, by joining ourselves unthinkingly to
those who, whether right or wrong, certainly are most loud and dogmatic
in their tone.  It is possible, that by calmly taking our stand on a
principle which has but few supporters, we may find ourselves, though we
appear to stand alone on earth, in holy fellowship with the clear-eyed
watchers of all earth’s transactions, who bend over heaven’s blue cope to
regard us, and with the God of truth and love.  Therefore let us watch
and pray while we thoughtfully consider this question, for it is a solemn
matter, and affects the weal of the Church and the world, and our own
with them, far more deeply than at first appears.

Before entering on the argument, I may be allowed to state, in a few
words, the reasons which have induced me to place my thoughts upon this
subject before the public.  At the last meeting of the Congregational
Union, I took occasion to state my objection to a proposed petition from
the meeting against the opening of the Crystal Palace on the Lord’s day.
I was, at the time, wholly unsupported, but have since found reason to
believe that there was a large amount of hearty and intelligent sympathy
with my objections which did not express itself.  I wrote to the editor
of the _British Banner_, stating the fact, and developing more fully my
views.  Since the publication of my letter, I have been subjected, in the
pages of religious papers, to misconstructions and misrepresentations,
especially from anonymous correspondents.  This was, of course, to be
expected; but hardly, perhaps, the singular want of comprehension, both
of my views and of their own, which some of the letter-writers displayed.
Having an intense dislike to a newspaper warfare, I felt it due to myself
and many of my brethren to state calmly my views, and to advocate them to
the best of my ability.  Whence this address to Christian people, which I
offer with sincerity and earnestness, trusting to their Christian charity
and candour to give a fair consideration to the principles and
conclusions which it sets forth.  I have thrown my argument into the form
of an address, which, for many reasons, I prefer.

The question to be considered in the following pages is this:—“Is it wise
and right for us, as Christians, to offer any opposition to the opening
of the Crystal Palace during a portion of the Lord’s day?”  I trust that
all into whose hands this may come, are of one mind as to the value and
importance of the Sabbath.  But there are those who take the negative on
this question, who are as loyal to the Sabbath, as honestly desirous to
have it better and more extensively observed, as the straitest of those
who have set themselves forth as its special defenders.  In making this
clear, it will be needful to examine the views of the great parties who
have expressed themselves against interference in this matter, but on
grounds with which I cannot accord.

There are many who take no part in the protest of, at any rate, a large
portion of the religious public, simply on the ground that an appeal to
Government, on any subject involving religious principles and
considerations, is undesirable in itself, and dangerous, inasmuch as it
may be made the precedent for future interference, in some more serious
form.  Gallio is their model ruler, a man “who cared for none of these
things.”  They hold that the State should have no thought and no voice on
such matters.  That such a movement as that of the Crystal Palace Company
may safely be left to stand or fall by its own merits.  If it be good,
they are sure it will come to something; if bad, they have a happy faith
that it will come to nought.  No doubt, such theories have a strong
intrenchment in the order of a ruling Providence.  Somehow, good things
do live, bad things do die, notwithstanding man’s efforts to the
contrary; but still, bad things are long a-dying, and God expects us
all—rulers, too, according to the measure of their rule—to help to end
them, and get them decently buried out of sight.  Had there been a
petition to Government to open all the beer-shops in the kingdom all day
and all night on the Sabbath, and the Government said yea, should we dare
to sit calmly by, and trust that the evil would cure itself?  Is it not
the business of Government to help to protect, by governmental effort and
action, the whole community from the effects of the worst passions and
most degrading views of the community?  Though, no doubt, the highest
condition of a State is that in which a healthy, moral, public feeling
renders such interference needless.  We have hardly yet arrived at this
Utopia of politics, and this excessive jealousy of Government, in the
present condition of England, obstructs many useful measures.  The
objection to Government expressing itself on this subject seems to be a
radically unsound one.  The question must be discussed on quite other
principles, if a healthy settlement of it is to be made.

There is a second party, which refuses to join in the protest through
indifference to the Sabbath, or latitudinarian views of its nature and
claims.  To them, the Sabbath appears to be simply a human institution; a
thing invented by priests for priestly purposes; an enslavement of man’s
free spirit; a formalism which mars the pure essence of devotion, makes
it a thing of times and seasons, and desecrates every other day that it
may consecrate one.  “Every day is a Sabbath,” according to this
doctrine; to attach holiness to any particular day, is to rob all the
rest of the holiness which belongs to them.  To tell a man that he can
worship best in sanctuaries in Sabbath seasons, is to fetter his right
and liberty of worship at all times and places; and, in short, the
Sabbath is regarded as the very key-stone of that arch of formalism on
which the Church rears the superstructure of her power.  Such is the
latitudinarian view of the Sabbath; and, of course, those who hold it,
rejoice in the prospect of the opening of the Crystal Palace on that day.
In order to discern the falseness of their views, we must glance at the
true idea of the Christian Sabbath.

Of all the popular cants of the day, perhaps that is at once the most
pretentious, and the most heartless, which asserts a necessary antagonism
between form and spirit, soul and body, the spiritual and the material,
and sets itself up as the special champion of spirit and the spiritual,
by maintaining that all forms and organizations, all times and seasons,
all modes and habitudes, are systematic conspiracies against the
liberties and rights of men.  This is the latest resurrection of the old
ascetic spirit, and must end—as all attempts to emancipate ourselves from
the conditions of life and development which God has implied in the
constitution of our being and of all things—have ended, in blank
immorality and shameless denial of all moral law.  This is the great
danger of our times.  It is not formalism that we have chiefly to fear.
There is more peril of our casting off all form and order, than of our
being mastered and bound by any one.  The Sabbath is of God.  He who
causeth the outgoing of the morning and evening to rejoice, causeth the
outgoing of the Sabbath morning to rejoice over the human world.  He who
gives to the weary body the refreshment of nightly slumber, gives to the
weary mind and spirit the rest of the Sabbath day.  We may steal the
hours from slumber, but the wrong will in the end avenge itself; and it
is at our peril, and to our certain detriment as men, societies, or
nations, that we steal its offices from the Sabbath. The moon, the
fairest and the benignest minister that attends our earth, marks out our
weeks for us.  She chimes with notes of silvery clearness the sevens,
while the sun intones the units on the bells of time.  In full tune with
living nature we keep our Sabbaths.  We enter into the universal harmony
when we consecrate our seventh day.  This surface analogy rests on the
deepest principles; and if, to any, this orderly procession of the
Sabbaths seem a formalism, a yoke of bondage, then the day, the night,
the periodic mealtime, the Christmas festival, the birthday greeting,
must be to them a torment and an insult.  The arrangements of all things
must be, to such, a maddening discord.  Even the primitive simplicities
of barbaric existence, if they could recur to it, would not emancipate
them.  But such an experience might, perhaps, convince them, that these
consecrations are the records of a vital progress—that these seasons, cut
off from the lump of untrained, untrimmed, unformed existence, are the
string courses of the masonry of that living temple of society, which
mark the lines of its emergence from the dark ocean of primitive barbaric
chaos and night.

A tendency to think lightly of what has been consecrated by the religious
feeling of the pious for long generations, is by no means a beautiful or
commendable thing.  We may be sure that some deep reason underlies the
disposition of pious minds with one consent, through successive ages, to
fall into a certain form or mode of action and thought.  God has other
ways of giving to the world commandments than by speaking or writing
them.  It is as distinctly a command of God to us to work by day and
sleep by night, as if it had been written on the tables of stone; and any
organized attempt to violate it exacts the penalties of a broken command.
And God has given to all men an implicit direction to observe a Sabbath,
in the instinct of its need which he has implanted in the constitution of
humanity.  This is witnessed even among the most degraded peoples, who
have wandered farthest from the first condition, and most injured the
original constitution, by means of the miserable substitutes wherewith
they are fain to supply its place.  But the question might fairly be
asked here—“Is this all the obligation of the Sabbath day?  Is it simply,
that as sleep is good for the body every night, so it is good for man
that, once in seven days, he should rest from his labours?  If this be
all, where is the religious obligation of the Sabbath?”  No, this is not
all.  When we speak of a man resting from his labours, we speak of a
_man’s rest_, and not of a brute’s.  A brute rests from toil that he may
renew the tension of his muscles; a man, that he may renew the tension of
his soul.  A _man’s_ work is not the work of his muscles only, nor is a
_man’s_ life the life of a labourer, of a student, of a priest, but all
these in unison.  And when God said, “Thou shalt rest on the seventh day
from all thy work,” he said it to _man_—to a being endowed with a spirit
capable of “looking before and after,” capable of looking up to Him,
whose natural and joyful employment, on his rest-days, should be to
refresh his higher powers, by special direction of them to their
appropriate objects, lest he should become embruted by his needful daily
toil.  We cannot separate, even in thought, when we look at it in
relation to God, between the rest of the Sabbath and spiritual activity
and devotion.  The fact, that it is a _man_ for whom God provides the
Sabbath, seems to indicate the kind of use which is to be made of it.
The man who deliberately holds himself back from a high exercise, of
which God has made him capable, and prefers to make his Sabbath more like
a brute’s than a man’s, commits, in relation to it, that most heavy of
transgressions, “a coming short of the glory of God.”  There is a sin
which no written law can touch—an inward sin, a sin of life, which
consists in living below the idea which God has implanted; a sin which
may co-exist with the most perfect legal righteousness, and which can
only be denominated “_a coming short of the glory of God_.”  Human rulers
may separate in their legislation between the rest and the religious
purpose of the Sabbath; they may say, “The first we will care for, it is
within our province; the second we can take no cognizance of by formal
statutes;” but the Divine Ruler can make no such separation.  To rest
from toil, and to restrain the thoughts and the heart from going out
through His creation and up to Him, is to commit that sin against Him
which the Apostle specifies as the fundamental transgression—a coming
short of His glory.  You see that it is a sin which may be committed in
churches and chapels, as well as in parlours, in Parks, in Crystal
Palaces, and on sea beaches.  I fear, the Sabbath is not to any of us
what it ought to be, in the measure in which it ought to be—a season of
inward renewing of strength for daily labour—a height to which God
affords us leisure and strength to climb, that we may look beyond the
stars which watch our daily travail, to HIM.

Thus far we have hardly glanced at the Sabbath as a positive institution
of the Lawgiver and Ruler of this world.  The view of the Sabbath which
has already been presented, seems to underlie all Divine legislation (and
there is such) upon the subject.  This is the foundation on which it
rests, towards the realization of this it works.  We miss much of the
meaning of the old Jewish legislation, by not going deep down beneath the
positive commandment, and studying, as we are able—nay, if friends of
Christ, bound to do—the necessity out of which the law arises, the
feature of the original Divine constitution which it is intended to
illustrate and guard.  This method will bring us into true tune with the
commandment, our observance will then be spiritual, that of a friend, a
child, not a slave.  Every law must have its reason in the nature of
things, must be intended to direct attention to, vindicate, or restore,
some reality which is in danger of being disregarded.  It is needful to
see what is behind the law, in order to understand it truly.  God saw
that there was in man a fearful tendency to deny the God that made him,
by withholding himself from the higher exercises, the higher life, of
which God made him capable—getting rid of spiritual burden and care, and
making his life as much like a brute’s as it could possibly become.  He
saw, moreover, that the struggle between the higher element and the
lower, the spirit and the flesh, which had broken loose from the spirit’s
control, would be a long and sharp one, in each human soul, and in the
world at large; and, tenderly compassionating his afflicted and
distracted prodigal children, He came, even in the very hour of their
apostacy, to help the higher nature in its conflicts, and finally give to
it the victory by allying it for ever with himself.  His purpose of mercy
had a methodic development—first the germ, then the blade, then the ear,
and after that the full corn in the ear.  He chose Abraham as the man
through whom He would enter into relations with his descendants, the
Jewish people, constituting them the people through whom He would enter
into relations with the whole human world.  He gave to the Jews a law,
the purpose of which was to bring out the original features of the
constitution of man, and his primal relations to God and to all things.
That which had been lost in the fall was re-established by the Jewish
economy, and every ordinance of God, which man, the sinner, had trampled
upon and spurned, was brought forth again, and sealed afresh, in the
sight of all the people, and, through history, in the sight of all men,
with the seal of the Almighty and the All-wise.  The Jews, in this solemn
covenant, were the representative people, through whom God was addressing
the whole human race.  It was, above all things needful, to bring out the
idea that there was power to support the original constitution of things,
though man had been suffered to attempt, for a time, at any rate, to
violate it.  God needed to bear most solemn witness before men, that no
violation of it could be successful; that it was girded with the living
splendour of His righteousness, and sustained by the terrible resources
of His power.  This, man had forgotten.  “Am I my brother’s keeper?” said
one, in wanton contempt of the law of that relationship of brotherhood
which had been established by God.  “These be thy gods,” said others, as
they danced around their golden calf, and, under the very shadow of
Sinai, made light of the living Lord.  Men were growing wanton in the
unbounded license to sin, to break every Divine command without immediate
and palpable penalty.  God had to tell this people, and through them the
world, with a terrible simplicity and sternness which even they could
understand, that an awful sanction attended the original unwritten laws
which He had established, and that the penalty of a systematic breach of
them must be death.  Let us take the legislation on the Sabbath as a
specimen.

The law is written thus, Exodus xx. 8, 9, 10, 11:—“_Remember the Sabbath
day_, _to keep it holy_.  _Six days shalt thou labour_, _and do all thy
work_; _but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God_: _in it
thou shalt not do any work_, _thou_, _nor thy son_, _nor thy daughter_,
_thy man-servant_, _nor thy maid-servant_, _nor thy cattle_, _nor thy
stranger that is within thy gates_: _for in six days the Lord made heaven
and earth_, _the sea_, _and all that in them is_, _and rested the seventh
day_: _wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day_, _and hallowed it_.”
The comment on it is given in Exodus xxxi. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17:—“_And
the Lord spake unto Moses_, _saying_, _Speak thou also unto the children
of Israel_, _saying_, _Verily_, _my Sabbaths ye shall keep_: _for it is a
sign between me and you throughout your generations_; _that ye may know
that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you_.  _Ye shall keep the Sabbath_,
_therefore_; _for it is holy unto you_: _every one that defileth it shall
surely be __put to death_: _for whosoever doeth any work therein_, _that
soul shall be cut off from among his people_.  _Six days may work be
done_; _but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest_, _holy to the Lord_:
_whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day_, _he shall surely be put to
death_.  _Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath_, _to
observe the Sabbath throughout their generations_, _for a perpetual
covenant_.  _It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for
ever_: _for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth_, _and on the
seventh day he rested_, _and was refreshed_.”  It has been said that this
is a too tremendous sanction to a mere formal institution.  We have seen
that this is not a mere formal institution, a day appointed arbitrarily
by the Lawgiver, as for wise reasons our lawgivers appoint days and
seasons upon earth.  It is a part of the original constitution, a beam
through the gloom of the first sentence, “_In the sweat of thy brow shalt
thou eat bread_;” a station for man the wayfarer to rest and refresh
himself, as he ploughs and digs, and fights and forces his way through
the jungle of earth to God.  God, in this Sabbath institution, is
bringing out a fundamental and primal law, and He gives to it the very
highest sanction, a witness to all fundamental laws that the breach of
them is death.  That God did not regard it as a mere formal institution
is most evident, in that He himself protests against the mere form of it,
when it was offered to him as a sacrifice widowed of the congenital soul.
Isaiah i. 13–15.  “_Bring no more vain oblations_; _incense is an
abomination unto me_; _the new moons and Sabbaths_, _the calling of
assemblies_, _I cannot away with_; _it is iniquity_, _even the solemn
meeting_.  _Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth_:
_they are a trouble unto me_; _I am weary to bear them_.  _And when ye
spread forth your hands_, _I will hide mine eyes from you_: _yea_, _when
ye make many prayers_, _I will not hear_: _your hands are full of
blood_.”  The Sabbath of the Jews was a perennial monitor, pointing
backwards to the earliest time.  “_Remember the Sabbath day_,” remember
the fountain of present and familiar liberties and joys.  The time came
when the alphabet of morals had been conned and thoroughly mastered, when
the whole world was to be put into possession of treasure which had been
accumulating in the hands of the Jews for ages.  It is a fine
illustration of the manner in which Judaism in its living germs, which
had never been suffered to perish, expanded into Christianity, to trace
the transition from the Jewish Sabbath to the Sabbath of the Christian
church.  It is more true, perhaps, to speak of growth than transition.

It seems very strange to some that a feature of Judaism so strongly
marked, has so little formal recognition and reinforcement in the New
Testament.  What is the foundation of the Christian Sabbath?  On what
ground of reason or of law does it rest?  Of law, none whatever.  To the
Pharisees, the men who sat in Moses’ seat, Christ appeared to be a
Sabbath breaker.  Whatever His estimation of it, His conduct with regard
to it was such, that it could at any rate be said, with a colour of
truth, “_This man is not of God_, _because he keepeth not the Sabbath
day_.”  On every occasion on which there is a question on the subject,
Christ appears in strong antagonism to the Churchmen of his time; and on
one occasion he defends himself by an appeal to an irregularity of David,
which he justified on the ground of necessity; a mode of defence which
must have greatly surprised them, which surprise he takes no pains to
mitigate.  And yet, mark you, he never allowed that he violated the
spirit of the Sabbath institution; nay, he charged the rigid Sabbatarians
with the violation, giving them a new lesson to learn—“_Go ye_, _and
learn what that meaneth_, _I will have mercy and not sacrifice_.”  For
the rest, we have to gather the Sabbath law out of the New Testament in
the following fashion:—

On the first day of the week, the Saviour arose from the dead, and laid
the foundation of a new creation.  On the first day of the week, Jesus
appeared to his disciples, (John xx. 19 and 26.)  On the first day of the
week, the Apostles were baptized with tongues of fire.  On the first day
of the week, the disciples came together to break bread at Troas, (Acts
xx. 7.)  On this day Paul thinks a work of charity specially graceful and
appropriate, (1 Cor. xvi. 2.)  There is little doubt, but no decisive
evidence, that the assemblies of Christians alluded to “passim” in the
Epistles, are to be referred to this day; and John, in Patmos, “_was in
the Spirit on the Lord’s day_.”  As far as the New Testament is
concerned, we believe that this is all.  Some, then, might say that it is
simply by implication and inference, and not by distinct commandment,
that the Church keeps a Sabbath.  The Jewish Sabbath, with all its awful
sanctions, vanishes, and no one can quote any law of the New Testament
which sets up anything in its place.  No one can show by what authority
the day was altered, nor tell how far the authority, which changed the
day, could transfer the sanctions and penalties from the old day to the
new.  In mere word, this is true enough.  It is untrue enough, at heart.
How does the Sabbath come down to us?  As a day set apart, through all
Christian ages, by the deliberate consecration of the whole Catholic
church from apostolic times.  We must not rail too much at tradition.
The Lord’s day is certainly more a tradition than a commandment.  And
what, in the Christian church, is the office of the Spirit in relation to
Divine things, and, among them, Divine laws?  Is it not the office of the
Spirit to lead men to see from within the wisdom and goodness of the
commandment, and lovingly to adopt it; showing to the soul of man the
wisdom of the Divine constitution in everything, and securing, not a
formal, but a loving adhesion to it; abandoning entirely the system of
formal prohibitions and penalties, as inconsistent with the method of
grace and of love?  Does the absence of a Divine testimony against theft
or adultery, in Christ’s epitome of the commandments, legalize theft or
adultery?  And does the absence of a renewed formal announcement of the
original Divine provision for man—the Sabbath-day—mean that God ceases to
care for it, that He annuls the first constitution, and leaves man to
work on till death like a brute?  On the contrary, it means that the
Spirit of God, and not the law, has taken charge of the institution, and
that He will make its power felt and its worth acknowledged, wherever He
bears witness within human souls.  But it is a very terrible sin to take
it out of His charge, and make it law again, by presenting it in any
other way than He presented it to the early Christian world.  Has not the
Lord’s day come down to us just as we should have anticipated—through the
Spirit?  Was there not a deep reason beneath the old institution, Exodus
xxxi. 17—“_It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever_:
_for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth_, _and on the seventh day
He rested_, _and was refreshed_.”  Is there not as deep a reason
underneath the new?  Is it not the _Lord’s day_?  The Jewish day
commemorated a creation complete; the Christian Sabbath, a creation
begun.  The one a last day—the finishing of a work—looking backwards to
the original condition and constitution; the other a first day, with the
week days, the ages, the eternities before it, commemorating a new
condition and constitution, or the old one transfigured, to bear fruit
through a future eternity.  For myself, I would handle as reverently the
Lord’s day which the Spirit has delivered to us through the Church, as
the Jew his Sabbath, protected by the penalties of the law.  Only, as
Christians, we are bound to go further back than the Jew could go, dared
go, even beneath and behind the commandment, and enter into the counsels
of Him who gave to us the Sabbath day.  We are to regard the purpose and
spirit of the Sabbath.  A man who goes to church twice and worships, and
thinks that therein he has fulfilled the law of the Sabbath, and brands
him as a law-breaker _ipso facto_ who has never been to church at all,
fearfully misunderstands the matter.  The thing is good; its goodness is
now its argument; and that observance which is not in full tune with its
goodness, may be worth much before men, but is worth nothing before God.
A father who has children at home, in early years compels them by law to
join the family circle, and observe the laws and orders of the house.
When they are full grown, he tries to make the home attractive, and
leaves it to the sense of duty, love, and pleasure, to work conformity.
This Christian view of the Sabbath is the very opposite of that which
makes every day a Sabbath, and dishonours the one.  The endeavour to
realize every day a Sabbath feeling, if genuine and constant, will add
fresh value to _the_ Sabbath of refreshment and repose; while a
disposition to slight the Lord’s day, on the pretext of keeping all days
holy, will end in exhausting life of its spiritual element, and
destroying the very soul of man’s work.

Having laid down these principles with regard to the Christian Sabbath,
in refutation of the rationalistic argument, let us proceed to the
practical application of them to the matter in hand.  The case is just
this.  An institution is about to be formed and an exhibition opened,
which must be regarded as the legitimate fruit of the forty years’ peace
which that stern warrior conquered for us, whom we have just attended
with befitting splendour to his burial, whose mourners were a million and
a half of men.  The Crystal Palace of last year was its direct result—the
World’s Great Show—the Jubilee of Commerce, celebrated with festal pomp
in London—the heart of the body commercial—whence also had gone forth,
forty years ago, the head and the hands which had torn the troubler of
the world’s peace from his throne, and inaugurated the new era.  England
gained the victory, and at the end of a long generation, unparalleled for
activity and enterprise in the history of man, she called the world to
her capital to see and to taste the fruits.  Her grey old warrior was
spared to see it.  The peaceful pageant of commerce passed by him and did
him homage, and then he was taken to his rest.  It is surely remarkable,
that Wellington was spared to see the crown of his labours—the fruit of
generations of peaceful activities, which will be marked in history by
his name—and then was removed before the event was consummated which may
cost the world another struggle, and the blood of her bravest men.  Such
was the Crystal Palace of 1851.

The Crystal Palace of 1853 will have another and profounder character.
It is an attempt to consecrate these fruits of the world’s strivings to
the education and elevation of the great masses, whom commerce has too
long used up, and then flung aside to perish.  It is a deliberate effort
to gather all the ripest fruit of the world’s most earnest strivings,
most glorious victories, and present them, in order to minister to the
development of the men, women, and children of the present generation.
It is no mere exhibition, except in the sense in which the whole world is
an exhibition.  It is the grandest conception of a hitherto mechanical
and money-loving generation, and has its root far deeper than in a desire
for 5 per cent. returns.  It grows up through the force of a conviction,
which is now wrought into the mind of the community, that the intellect
and wealth which commerce has developed, owe a ministry to the people of
the land; and that while the merchant princes can pillage the Continent,
Egypt, Palestine, India, and China, of their treasures, to minister to
their own vanity, amusement, or instruction, the united strength of the
intellect and wealth of the country should build a Palace, far
transcending all private palaces, for the great people whose industry has
made our England the queen of the kingdoms of the earth.  It is
emphatically a People’s Palace, and the organization of it on this
gigantic scale, by men of shrewd understanding, is certainly a sign that
the tide of public feeling has turned towards higher, more intellectual,
more elevating pursuits and recreations, than it affected some fifteen
years ago.  The fact that the keenest speculators are now ransacking our
world for the treasures of art, science, and the early history of our
race, wherewith to adorn this Palace, is a proof that the very class
which has been most prone to renounce all the higher attributes of
humanity, and to make its life like that of the brutes that perish, is
beginning to resume the exercise of those higher attributes, and to waken
to a sense of what a man’s life includes.  It is possible that many may
regard this view of the New Exhibition as overstrained.  Many expect that
people will go to the Crystal Palace to see the sight, and, when they
have seen it, will go to the public-houses and finish there.  Such a view
is both shallow and faithless.  No doubt, those who like to think so will
find plenty which will appear to sustain their views.  “The people” is a
vague term.  It needs patient and intelligent observation, not on the
outskirts, but in the centre of a great popular movement, to discern its
character.  The experience of the last few years does not confirm such
anticipations.  The working classes, who visit the Museum in Great
Russell Street, the Zoological Gardens on Monday, Hampton Court, and Kew,
add nothing to the disorder and drunkenness of the metropolis.  It is
wonderfully rare, even in the more distant exhibitions and places of
intelligent enjoyment which have been mentioned, to meet with disorder.
Certainly, the drunkenness and disorder of London have been greatly
diminished by the opening of places of resort for the working classes
where mind as well as body may be fed.  Every thing in the past justifies
the extension of the experiment, and on the grandest scale.  To the poor
man, these things are not so much exhibitions as they are to us who can
more frequent them.  They partake of the dignity of events, stir up the
fountains of manhood, perhaps long stagnant, and make him feel life’s
meaning and life’s worth, and thus they expand his soul.  Now, it is
worth while seriously to consider—Is this _different_ from the object
which God proposed in the institution of the Sabbath day?  It stops far
short of that object; but, as far as it goes, does it not travel in the
same direction, and aim at the lifting man up from the brutish condition
into which a too slavish daily toil would plunge him, to feel how much a
man is better than a brute?  God, in the Sabbath institution, seeks to
make him feel that man is so much better than a brute, that he can talk
to God as a Friend, and love Him as a Father.  No human effort can teach
man that;—no Sabbath observance, even of the strictest sort, can make man
observe the Lord’s day, as the Lord counts observance; but when men, in
the mass, are gone so far from the Sabbath that they systematically
prostitute and pollute it, does God frown on human institutions, which
work, however slowly and dimly, towards the realization of the benefit?
Does He not say of all such, “_Forbid them not_, _for he that is not
against us is on our side_?”  If through the unconscious influence of
Christianity, which has leavened even our speculating fraternities, “the
earth is helping” the Kingdom; if the back-water of the mill-wheel of the
Church has come round, and is adding its strength to the current; let us
look on it lovingly and hopefully, as a state of things to be fostered
and led onward to what is better, in no wise to be resisted and banned.
And if men want to see this thing which is to elevate and educate them on
the Lord’s day—the great mass of the people being notoriously averse to
the Sabbath of the Church—we should not say, roughly and fiercely, “You
shall not,” but recognize it, as far as it goes, as a sign of progress,
hoping that, by all the humanizing influences which are brought to bear
on them, we may regain a hold on them, and lead them on to a true
appreciation of the Christian idea of the Sabbath.  The gist of the
matter seems to lie here:—at present, we have but slight hold on the
working classes; they care not for our Sabbaths, and find no pleasure in
our worship.  Is it right, on the ground that it would be a formal breach
of that Sabbath which is now really and flagrantly violated, to refuse
our consent to a movement which will secure for them some portion, at any
rate, of benefit on the Lord’s day?

With many, much of the argument turns on this word “formal” breach.  It
is worth while to consider more fully its meaning, and to inquire into
the real notions of Sabbath observance which prevail in the Christian
church.  We are all agreed, that the highest kind of good was
contemplated by God in the institution of the Sabbath; we are not all
agreed that, failing the highest good, a lesser good which is within our
reach may lawfully be secured.  Many good people reason thus:—“The
Sabbath is God’s day.  It is the portion of man’s time which He has cut
off and consecrated to himself; the mere time is His, as well as the
spirit of the worshipper; to recognize any secular employment of such
time, is to recognize a robbery of God.”  “_Remember thou keep holy the
Sabbath day_.”

To this view of Sabbath observance it may be objected—1.  It recognizes a
distinction in _kind_ between the common day and the sacred day, which
has no warrant in the New Testament Scripture.  Is not “work” a command,
as well as “worship?”  And is not every commandment holy, and obedience
holy?  Is it only on the first day that we are to be fervent in spirit?
Are we not to be serving the Lord by diligence in business, with fervent
spirit, every day in the week, in our places of business, and the haunts
of men?  The idea that the Sabbath is a kind of tribute paid to God, to
allow us to go free to work on week-days—a sort of composition—is foreign
both to the spirit and the letter of the teaching of the New Testament.
The Lord’s day is to be a day of refreshing, of renewing of soul, that
every day may be a day of Divine service, and have more, not less, of the
sacred element infused into it.  The idea of a tribute of one day out of
seven, false as it is, rules very much of the feeling of the religious
public on this question, and perhaps in a measure affects all our hearts.
But a second objection, and a plainer one, to this view of the law of
Sabbath observance, is this:—there is hardly a Christian to be found who
professes practically to carry it out.  How much of our Sabbath is
literally spent in devotion, how much in cheerful converse with the
family circle, how much in meals, how much in criticism of the sermon,
not always of a highly spiritual cast, how much in passing references to
the leading topics of the day?  Let us be honest and single-minded, and
answer from our consciences these questions.  If we were to try our
Sabbath observance by that law which _did_ consecrate the time in its
unity and completeness, which of us could stand?  Do we regard this as a
sin?  By no means; because we feel that Christian Sabbath observance is
in the spirit, and not in the letter; in the direction of our thoughts
and desires without hindrance from the work-day world to God; in the
feeling of rest—of Sabbath calm—of holy peace and joy—which has possessed
us, and made our Sabbath more a thing to be measured by the Spirit’s
instruments, and registered in the Spirit’s record, than by the clock.
And if a man has no homage to render, no spiritual good to gain, because
he desires none, what does he gain, what does the Church gain, what does
the world gain, if he be compelled in some sort to recognize it, by being
debarred from a pursuit which would at any other time be beneficial to
him; provided always that his liberty be no detriment to those who have
better ways of spending the day?  Bring him to church to hear the Gospel!
By all means.  I would that all places of pleasure were shut up on
Sabbaths, because men felt that they had better work on hand than to
visit them.  But if the man says, “I will not enter your churches—I hate
them;”—we ask, where is the gain to him, to any one, in saying, “There
are the ale-houses, there are the tea-gardens—you are a sinner for going,
but there they are; there is, moreover, a train specially provided by
Government for you to travel; but this Crystal Palace, so grand and
beautiful, we can and will debar you from.  Whatever good it has to offer
you, you shall not get it on Sabbath days!”  It seems very foolish to
confess that all attempts to make the masses devote the hours of the
Sabbath to devotion are futile—that no serious limit can be set
successfully to the efforts of private speculators to tempt men to
demoralizing Sabbath desecration—and yet, when a scheme is set on foot
which aims at remedying in some sort the mischief, by elevating instead
of degrading men, because it is so good and so complete as to be of
national importance, its progress is barred at once.

This is the true secret of much serious opposition.  The national
character of this act is felt by many to be the chief objection to it.
Now let us understand what the word “national” implies.  There is, no
doubt, a very true sense in which a Government represents a nation.  But
it may represent truly or falsely; if falsely, does God regard it as the
representative of the national mind and will?  If the nation is bent on
not keeping the Sabbath in the highest manner, would the dictum of the
Government against all other ways of spending it, constitute a national
Sabbath observance?  All that we could gain in that case would be an
appearance—an appearance how awfully contradicted in Clerkenwell,
Rag-fair, Lambeth, Chelsea, Greenwich, and in every place of dense
population or public resort.  And does God care for this appearance?  Is
it a cloak that hides any thing from his eye?  Think you, that it seems
to Him a thing for the sake of which it is worth while to sacrifice one
instrument which may help man out of the pit of brutal degradation which
the Sabbaths of this metropolis disclose to us, yawning in the very heart
of the wisest, the greatest, the richest, the most godly city in the
world?  Many remember fondly what Sabbaths once were, and willingly shut
their eyes to the change.  In spite of the decent appearance of our
streets—and God forbid that we should ever lose it!—the reality is too
decisively the other way, for us to hope that a Government Act can give
to us a character before man or before God.  The national thought and
feeling utters itself every year more loudly.  It will not help us, while
the fire is raging, to batten down the hatches, and step the deck as
trimly as if the cry of alarm had never been heard.  We may shut the
Crystal Palace and be no nearer a national Sabbath keeping, nay, farther
from it,—as plagues pent up in the kilns of their own corruption but
taint the air more widely, and cover with their black shadow a broader
surface of the land.

Some fear that the act of the Legislature will add a sanction to Sabbath
breaking by which many will be emboldened.  Alas! the balance is not so
tremulous that the weight of Government in either scale will make it kick
the beam.  It is to be feared that many will frequent the Crystal Palace
on Sunday, who otherwise would be in the House of God.  This is, no
doubt, a very serious matter, but a simply preventive legislation will
not remedy the moral mischief out of which the evil springs.  For such,
no system of safeguards can be successful.  Men are beyond the reach of
protection, who would use the term “national sanction” as the cloak of
sin.

Thus much on the opposition arising from views of the nature of Sabbath
observance and its claims.  We must now pass on to notice a class of
objections founded on the nature of the Exhibition itself, and its
probable influence on the heart, mind, and manners of men.  Many expect
that men will get more harm from the accessories than good from the thing
itself.  Here, again, much is to be said on either side.  There will,
doubtless, be beer-houses, tea-gardens, skittle-grounds, and all the
apparatus of demoralization (though the licensing magistrates may do much
to prevent it); but may we not fairly expect that large numbers will
spend, on their travelling and admission, money which, if they stayed at
home, would be drunk or played away; that many will take their families
with them, which is always an elevating thing to the poor; that some, at
any rate, who go for pleasure, may find deeper thoughts awakened, and
turn with disgust from grosser amusements which, in other states of mind,
would delight them; and that, on the whole, an immense amount of vice and
sensuality will be spared, though, alas, there will be enough to waken
sorrow in all good men.  There will just be a battle between the interest
which the Crystal Palace will awaken, and meaner, grosser things.  Will
the baser triumph, when both are fairly brought to bear on men?  There is
enough in the history of public exhibitions, during the last twenty
years, to rebuke our faithlessness and teach us hope.  My whole argument
rests on the fact of existing and increasing neglect of worship and
church ordinances on the Sabbath day.  For how much of the existing
disaffection the Church is responsible, God only knoweth; but, certainly,
obstruction and prevention come from us with singularly bad grace.
Attraction is our one great power.  What we can attract and win, we keep.
What we constrain we cannot attach, and our chains are but ropes of sand.

One fruitful source of Sabbath desecration is the unnatural condition in
which men and women are compelled to live, in the heart of our great
cities.  Every thing around them blights the gentlest and most gracious
thoughts and feelings of our nature.  They live from hand to mouth—they
snatch at each day’s existence—they have no rest, no sense of possession
in the present, no hope for the future.  They are out of reach of true
rest on the Sabbath.  It is mere mockery to talk about it.  Keep them at
home, and the Sabbath cannot be a delight, except when an enthusiastic
spirit can wholly emancipate itself from circumstances.  God’s ordinance
seems to them a delusion and a snare.  Picture the miserable houses, the
foul air, the dirty, damp, mouldy walls, the reeking smoke, the
pestilential exhalations from the open sewer, the cries of drunkenness,
and the curses of blasphemy, amidst which we expect half a million of men
in our metropolis to pass the Sabbath.  No wonder that they fly from it,
fly to the ale-house, and drown there their disgust and despair.  They
are hardly within reach of our Christian instructions,—alas, for the seed
sown in such stony ground!  The circumstances of their life expose it to
fearful peril; a broad change must pass over the moral and mental
condition of these people before, _as a class_, they can be expected to
receive gladly the Gospel and bring forth its fruits.  Let them get out
to something they will care for—something that will teach them—God’s
clear air and sunshine, the violet odour, balmy to them as the breath of
Paradise, the bird song, the breeze among the boughs, the fresh clean
meadows, the sparkling wreathing river, and they are at once within reach
of better and holier thoughts.  Or if no thoughts come to them, for
impressions shape themselves into thoughts but slowly in minds inept, yet
a genial refreshing dew has passed over their spirits—they feel that the
city life, with its squalor and misery, is man’s work not God’s,—and at
last, though the thought may be long in ripening, they may come to think
that it may be true after all, as the Bible says, that in God the poor
man has a defender and keeper, and a remedy for all the ills which sin
and selfishness have entailed upon the world.

Those who see much of this class will be deeply convinced that we have no
means of reaching them at present as a class, though the direct and
earnest attention of the Church, in all its branches, to their condition
and needs, is a most hopeful symptom; but looking at this great class,
and their relation to society—so benighted, so withered in soul, as to
resist sternly the Divinest influences—I confess it seems to me a
terrible responsibility to keep them away, on any day, from anything
which would do them even a little good.  It is but little that we can
hope, and that little will be slowly realized.  With sorrow we open the
way for them—sorrow, that they will not choose a more excellent way.  We
believe in God’s high purpose in the institution of the Sabbath day, and
fling wide the gates of our sanctuaries.  But if men pass scornfully or
scowlingly, let us at least be thankful, tearfully thankful, if they are
not passing by our doors to dens of vice and crime.  Let us not tell
them, If you do not come here, the Lord does not care where you go.  Let
us tell them that HE follows them everywhere with His care,—that HE has
spread abroad the expanse of nature for them,—that He has given art,
science, commerce, and history to man;—it may chance that many, hearing
this, may desire to know more of Him, and learn from himself what He
means by a Sabbath day.

It may be said, and with justice, that the majority of the frequenters of
the Crystal Palace will hardly be of the class which has been described.
Not the poorest, but the class above the poorest—the well-paid artizans,
the shopmen and shopwomen, the mercantile clerks and the kindred classes
will furnish at any rate a large proportion of the visitors to this
Exhibition.  It is worth one’s while to consider thoughtfully whether we
are prepared to apply the same rigid rule, as regards the measure of time
to be devoted to public services on the Lord’s day, to the poor workman
and shopman confined to the hot dense air of the factory or shop during
all the disposable hours of the week, and living probably in a home but
sparely visited by the light and air of heaven,—between which home and
the sanctuary he ought, according to the present theory, to divide his
time on the Sabbath,—and to the rich man who, in the afternoon or
evening, can walk in his own garden, pluck the fruit of his own vine and
fig-tree, ventilate his lungs in the purest and balmiest air, and, being
refreshed in body, can go down to God’s house in comfort and refresh his
soul.  We must beware, lest we make the lot of the poor more bitter by
the yoke of our law of ordinances which are in themselves beautiful and
benignant, lest he take the name of his God in vain.  Many hold forth a
rest day in the week as the remedy.  This simply means, in most cases,
the sacrifice of four or five shillings a week.  Six days’ labour can
hardly supply the needs of a poor man’s family, especially its higher
needs.  The loss of some shillings is certainly the loss of some books,
some schooling, some innocent amusements for his children, and is, not
seldom, the loss of bread.

The last, and in the estimation of a large number of religious men, the
most serious aspect of the question which I will refer to is this:—“The
opening of the Crystal Palace,” it is said, “is but the door to the
opening of the national institutions, the theatres, and, finally, the
factories and shops on the Sabbath.”

But there is evidently a limiting principle at work, recognized by the
public, and expressed by the Government.  The limitation of the hours,
the clause against the sale of spirituous liquors, and the close of that
portion of the building which would involve actual handiwork, are
recognized by the public at once as right and seemly.  There is a public
feeling in England which will care for these things, which are supposed
to be imperilled; a public feeling which, during the next years, it will
be the office of the Church to nurture and unfold.  If that public
feeling fail us, then, unquestionably, our condition will be most
serious; and the question must be argued, how far a Government may
maintain, in the face of public feeling, a system of preventions and
prohibitions?  That it has the right, up to a certain point, most people
feel; that there is a point beyond which it is most unsafe, all are
agreed.  But that point will never be reached in England, while the
Church is faithful to her country and to her Lord.  If that point ever be
reached, on us will be the sin.  Ministers of the Church of Christ! there
has been too long a schism in the army.  The shepherds have been battling
for precedence and prerogative, and the sheep have strayed.  The call to
us now is for work; work—not by platform crudities, vanities, and
falsities; not by protests, preventions, petitions, and bills of
spiritual rights;—but by earnest, manful, godly, spiritual effort to make
the Gospel known and felt as the power of God unto salvation.  The power
of the Gospel is not felt as it once was.  Admirable sermons are
preached, and with admirable emphasis and theatric art, but power does
not go forth from them.  Men look at us, hear us, admire us, but our
prehensile power is gone.  We do not lay hold on men.  We have dealt too
much in a religion of exclusions and negations.  We need to take hold on
men, and say,—“We have good news—good news of God.”  The cry, “Good news!
light! bread! life!” should be heard more loudly from our pulpits.  We
should not lack hearers, if we could make them feel that we had good news
to tell.  Were our Master among us at this crisis, He would not work by
protests and prohibitions.  Wherever the people were, there would He be,
vehement against organized hypocritic wickedness, but patient, gentle,
merciful to the souls gone astray in their darkness and misery.  Oh, that
our hearts could catch that tone of touching human tenderness wherewith
He would address this weary and burdened generation, “_Come unto me_,
_all ye that are weary and heavy laden_, _and I will give you rest_.”
But He is with us alway, and, by ways that we little discern and
sympathize with, He may be leading this generation to himself.  Let us be
humble-hearted and full of charity; let us work, work harder and more
lovingly, with more oneness of heart and voice, to make men feel that it
is God’s good news to them which we have in charge, and then will our
Sabbaths return to us, fresh and pure, beautiful and blest, as that
George Herbert wrote of.



“SUNDAY.


             “O day most calm, most bright,
    The fruit of this, the next world’s bud,
    Th’ indorsement of supreme delight,
    Writ by a friend, and with his blood;
    The couch of time; care’s balm and bay:
    The week were dark, but for thy light:
             Thy torch doth show the way.

             “Man had straight forward gone
    To endless death: but thou dost pull
    And turn us round to look on one,
    Whom, if we were not very dull,
    We could not choose but look on still;
    Since there is no place so alone,
             The which he doth not fill.

             “The Sundays of man’s life,
    Threaded together on time’s string,
    Make bracelets to adorn the wife
    Of the eternal glorious King.
    On Sunday heaven’s gate stands ope;
    Blessings are plentiful and rife,
             More plentiful than hope.

             “The rest of our creation
    Our great Redeemer did remove
    With the same shake, which at his passion
    Did th’ earth and all things with it move.
    As Samson bore the doors away,
    Christ’s hands, though nail’d, wrought our salvation,
             And did unhinge that day.

             “The brightness of that day
    We sullied by our foul offence:
    Wherefore that robe we cast away,
    Having a new at his expense,
    Whose drops of blood paid the full price,
    That was requir’d to make us gay,
             And fit for Paradise.

             “Thou art a day of mirth:
    And where the week-days trail on ground,
    Thy flight is higher, as thy birth.
    O let me take thee at the bound,
    Leaping with thee from sev’n to seven,
    Till that we both, being toss’d from earth,
             Fly hand in hand to heaven!”

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

         J. UNWIN, Gresham Steam Press, 31, Bucklersbury London.





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