The Sabbath, the Crystal Palace, and the People, by James Baldwin Brown

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

THE
SABBATH, THE CRYSTAL PALACE,
AND THE PEOPLE.

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

p. 3THE 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 p. 4society 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 p. 5the 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 p. 6question, 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, p. 7should 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 p. 8view 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, p. 9or 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 p. 10speaking 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 p. 11embruted 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 p. 12which 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 p. 13at 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 p. 14wanton 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 p. 15put 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, p. 16even 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, p. 17Christ 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 p. 18which 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 p. 19He 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 p. 20misunderstands 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 p. 21heart 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 p. 22cent. 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 p. 23find 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 p. 24so 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. p. 25Is 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—p. 26a 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 p. 27gain, 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 p. 28very 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 p. 29but 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 p. 30find 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. p. 31God’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 p. 32convinced 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. p. 33It 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.”

p. 34But 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 p. 35theatric 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.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Sabbath, the Crystal Palace, and the People

THE
SABBATH, THE CRYSTAL PALACE,
AND THE PEOPLE.

p. 3THE SABBATH, THE CRYSTAL PALACE, AND THE PEOPLE.

“SUNDAY.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE