ings, and Sunday-schools in the intervals.

Each fancies his

own way is a model of piety, a heaven on earth. Indeed we have somewhere read of a devout man, who could not think heaven any thing materially different from a sort of perpetual Sabbath, on which all the angels put on clean shirts, and went and heard a sermon from the apostle Paul!

But while we agree with those who denounce the Phariseeism of many of the sabbatarians, we maintain that there is in the day of rest a popular privilege, a divine institution, a sacred Magna Charta of the people, for time and eternity. There is a humanity in the conservation of it, a practical good in it, which will establish irresistible claims upon the heart of every man possessed of one. Thomas Hood, instead of being the satirist of the sabbatarians, would have been their lyrical advocate, if the divine humanity of the day of rest, and the importance of preserving it, had been brought fairly before his mind.

Sabbath observance, if the formalities are not the expressions of the heart, is not obedience to God at all. Of all social institutions, the day of rest is the best gift of the Almighty to all classes, but especially to the poor. To the working man, the day of rest is an estate of time, a sacred property given him by his Maker for his whole well-being-physical, economical, moral, and spiritual. It is his day of emancipation. A week of seven working-days- sabbathless months or years-mean perpetual vassalage and entire slavery. The man who has no sabbath, has no period for the cultivation of himself— health, or mind, or heart, or soul. He is robbed of his home, when robbed of the day God has given him for the cultivation of the family affections, without which home is hearthless, cold, dark, and bitter. By a perpetual encasement of sordid toil-a poisonous Nessus robe, whose influences extend to his soul—the immortal spirit of the man is unmanned, brutified, demoralised, and destroyed.'

'Work! work! work! From weary chime to chime,

Work, work, work!

As prisoners work for crime!

*

Work, work, work!

In the dull December light,

And work, work, work!

When the weather is warm and bright.

Oh, but for one short hour!
A respite, however brief!

No blessed leisure for love or hope,
But only time for grief!

*

Oh God! that bread should be so dear,

And flesh and blood so cheap!'

The defence of a day of rest in every week for every living creature, is a humane and wise thing, even were the Bible a mystic book, Christianity a philosophy, and God 'a pervading spirit of intellectual beauty.'

The sabbath question has been raised by the sudden spread of railways. Within a few years and chiefly within the last twenty months, a gigantic net-work of railways has been thrown over Great Britain, with Sunday trains in greater or less numbers on almost every line. Of course the question has been chiefly argued in reference to the occasion which raised it. Sunday trains have been the moot points. Is the Sabbath train exempted from the Divine law of sacred and universal rest? Have the public a right to travel on all highways on all days? These are the questions put by the conflicting disputants.

It is observable and notable, that this stout contention about the right to travel on Sundays, has been raised at a period when an extraordinary diminution in the length of time, necessary for travelling any given distance, has become the marvel of the age. When we can travel at the rate of a mile in a minute, for the first time since Adam, the demand is made to be able to travel on the day of rest. When intelligence can be transmitted hundreds of miles in a few seconds, an unusual earnestness and vehemence is used, in insisting upon the right to the use of a day hitherto sacred from general use, in the transport of passengers or news. The public surely can spare the day better than ever. We can do as much travelling in an hour as our grandfathers could do in a day. We can transmit intelligence in an hour, which they could scarcely have done in a week. Precisely when this is happening, do we demand the day of rest for transmission of passengers and news. Genius and talent, the skill of workers in iron, and the sinews of labourers, have obtained for us a marvellous saving of time, in regard to the transport of goods, passengers, and intelligence. A benevolent regard for those whose toils gain us these advantages, would suggest the duty of holding the resting day of the engineer, the stoker, the engine-driver, and the train-guard as peculiarly sacred. By an institution derived from the earliest times, which many of the best and wisest of men have believed

to be divine, these men have a vested, a sacred, right to a day of rest. God has given it to them. Man has given it to them, by the laws of many nations and peoples, and the will and wisdom of countless generations. Is it not strange, that it should be precisely the men who have saved so much of time for us, that we wish to deprive of their estate of time, their property in a seventh of their lives? Never in reference to travelling could we better afford to spare the Lord's-day. There never were in the world before, equal means of making up for all delays when the day of rest is over. Stokers and enginedrivers annihilate time and space for us. While we sleep, they conduct us to the end of our journey with the speed of the racer. Surely in these circumstances, we can afford them the time which is needful for their moral and spiritual, their physical and mental, their temporal and eternal well-being. To deprive them of their Sunday, when they have given us many days, is a grasping niggardliness dishonourable to the public, and ruinous to the railway employées.

However, though we are zealously conservative of the day of rest, there appears to us to be nothing in the New Testament in favour of forcing the observance of Christian ordinances upon the world. Not a syllable of it, as we read it, sanctions any attempts to make men keep the first day of the week by law. In our opinion there is not a particle of it therefore favourable to the Agnew movement. Theocratic notions have not yet been pounded out of all heads, and the fact makes itself apparent in an agitation by persons called by the name of Sabbatarians. But we regard the theocratic dogmas as superstition worthy of a condemnation, side by side with papal infallibility. To us the talk of religionists about covenanted nations, and Christian legislatures, and Christian people, seems never to have represented anything but ideas which have not, and never had, any realities correspondent to them in this world. The legislation, which has embodied these famous fancies, has generally been unjust and oppressive, and however they may repudiate the doctrine, the men who ask for more of this legislation, when judged by the tendencies of their actions, are as justly censurable as if they thought—

'The mortal husk could save the soul, By trundling, with a mere mechanic bias,

To church, just like a lignum vitæ bowl.'

Neither the moral code, nor the social conventions of ascetic evangelism are the perfection of moral truth. Least of all are we blind to the abundance of men in the evangelical world

whose Christianity has very little likeness to that of Him who went about doing good.' He went about doing good!' This expression is, in sublimity, to the moral world, what-Let there be light, and there was light!' is to the physical. The following of this moral example of doing good, is what we deem the true embodiment of Christianity. But to judge by many personages abundantly known, one might suppose the proper reading of the text was not, by their fruits ye shall know them,' but by their talk ye shall know them. It requires no great shrewdness to see, that in these days, the men of Christlike talk, and the men of Christlike deeds, are very different classes of persons. The Christian talkers are mere performers upon platforms and in pulpits. The Christian doers are very different persons. They do not concern themselves about portraits or pictures of themselves. Self-display is not their habit. But they are men who live only to relieve human misery. Some of them devote their lives to ameliorate the condition of paupers. Some erect schools for outcast children. They exhibit the wrongs of the factory operatives. Their spirits labour with plans for reclaiming fallen women and criminal men. They visit the poor, amidst the pestilential vapours which destroy their lives. Asylums are opened by them for the houseless, who were wont to shiver through the winter nights in dry arches of the bridges, and on the benches, or under the trees of the parks. The Christian doers are men who confront the evils of the time, the demon spells of the bottle, which drive families through poverty and crime to madness, and the causes which are increasing our criminals faster than our people, and our young criminals faster than our adult criminals. They consider the poor, and seek not the applauses of public meetings. They visit prisoners, and do not employ artists to paint them in the most picturesque attitudes of benevolence. By such men, the mentally diseased are studied and relieved, if not cured. By such men the moral and spiritual evils of the age are checked, if not lessened; the miseries of the people are revealed, if not relieved; and selfishness and demonism branded in their work, if not deterred from their career, of destruction and death.

Of the true kind of Christian doers was the late Dr. Chalmers, especially in his last days, when, sated with the triumphs of pulpit oratory, he devoted himself to excavate the heathen' of the West Port of Edinburgh. It was his mode of expressing his disapprobation of the profitable professions of evangelism in vogue. He cared chiefly for a gospel which was preached to the poor, the needy, the outcast, and the criminal. In the year 1841, we had a good deal of conversation with him upon many

topics. Among the rest, we talked over the Sabbath question. We told him how we regretted to see a beneficent object, and a sacred cause, injured by being advocated in the spirit of those

'Who hanged their cats on Mondays,

For killing mice on Sundays.'

He said he had no sympathy with this spirit, and had kept himself aloof as much as possible from the manifestations of it. We stated to him the economic argument in favour of a seventh day of rest. If the people can do a seventh more work by working upon Sundays, the abolition of the day of rest would just be equivalent to adding a seventh to the available labour of a country already suffering from over population. If they cannot do more work in seven days than in six, in a series of years, the abolition of the day of rest is not attended with a single advantage in reference to the production of wealth, which is the accumulated results of labour. Viewed in this way, the seventh day ought to be secured to the people, even by an industrial shrewdness analogous to that of the farmer who gives a year of rest to his over-cropped field. The moral quality of labour is the one to which it owes its highest efficacy, the mental is an inferior, and the physical element is the meanest ingredient in that efficiency which produces wealth. The seventh day-the day of spiritual and moral training—is, therefore, the time for imbuing the labour of a country with its highest, noblest, and most effectual element. The violation of the Sabbath, the abolition of the day of rest, is the destruction of the most invaluable part of the producer of wealth. Bad for religion, bad for morals, bad for mind and bad for health, the abolition of the Sabbath would, therefore, be bad for wealth.

Dr. Chalmers, before his death, cherished an intention of treating the Sabbath-question in this broad and popular way. He responded to the conviction cordially, that no tribune of the people could lift up his voice for a nobler privilege of theirs, than this seventh day. The lights and shades of enthusiastic feeling played on his grand face, as he talked of combating a selfish, and an ignoble, and an ignorant, political economy, in defence of the right of the people to the full strength of their bodies, the full culture of their minds, and the Divine development of their souls. Returning to the subject sometime afterwards, he said this view fitted in with all his habits of thinking, for his plan for the regeneration of the people was, by dividing the population into bodies of two thousand, duly supplied with a church, a saving's bank, and a school, to produce a population whose independence, frugality, intelligence, and industry should