great delusion. The fact is we have never as yet laid hold of them as a
body; and we have not done so, because we have never used the proper
means. And yet, bad as things are, I never walked through any of the
worst haunts of London without being assured by persons of age and
experience, that things are not half so bad as they were twenty or thirty
years ago. And the improvement is going on. There are more churches,
chapels, and schools than were in existence in former years, and more
persons attending them; there never was in the whole history of the
country so many of the masses found in the house of God, or under a
course of religious instruction; and the only thing that can prevent this
reformation from going on, is Sabbath labour and the opening such places
as the Crystal Palace on the Lord’s-day. I have, Sabbath after Sabbath,
preached in Sion Chapel, Whitechapel, to between three and four thousand
persons, most of them operatives from Spitalfields and the neighbourhood,
and yet within a stone’s throw the Rev. Mr. Champneys had Whitechapel
Church thronged; and just at hand other churches and chapels were well
filled. It is untrue to talk of our losing hold of the masses; they
never attended on the house of God in such numbers as now, nor were they
ever in so favourable a condition to be won by Christian exertion.
Infidelity, trades unions, socialism, halls of sciences, dissipation,
thieving, &c., &c., have all failed, and they are now literally waiting
to be gathered to the fold of Christ. But if they were not, the man who
would suppose, that opening a Crystal Palace on Sundays would supply
these poor souls with funds to go there, and would catch them all and
make them first-water citizens and Christians, must be a wilder
enthusiast than has ever yet entered the walls of Bedlam or St. Luke’s.
My Lord, there never was a greater hoax than this Sydenham speculation;
and the arguments used in its favour, show us what sanctimonious fanatics
some men will stoop to be if gain can be won by pretended philanthropy
and godliness.
But it is added, that we are to use _moral_ means to win the masses; and
we reply that we propose to employ no other. We view the Sabbath in its
two aspects as a civil and a religious institution—as a physical and a
spiritual boon to mankind; and we do not wish that the legislature should
enact one law respecting the religious observance of the day; we only ask
the Government to fulfil its political duty by securing to the labourer
that exemption from toil which would injure his health, and of which
wicked men would rob him if the civil power did not interfere. We are
not so foolish as to suppose that mere rest from labour is religion or
holiness to the Lord; but we do believe that the rest is necessary for
instruction in holiness; and therefore we say to the State, You do your
duty and protect the labourer from toil, and then let the Church use all
proper moral means to influence him to spend his Sabbath in such a manner
as shall conduce to his intellectual, moral, and eternal welfare. But
our ultra liberals, after becoming quite angry and calling us a number of
ugly names, exclaim, “We depend on the omnipotence of moral means”; and
then turn around to a host of sharpers and say, “You may depend upon our
utmost aid in enabling you to keep these poor fellows from ever having
the least chance of coming within the reach of these moral means! Work
the slaves as much as you like, work them seven days a week, we will see
that no legislative enactment shall secure them from being slain by
labour, or give them leisure to come to the house of God”! How infidels,
atheists, the speculators in the nerves and muscles of their fellow man,
and all who view the operative as a mere beast of burden, exult as they
thus behold religious liberty voluntarily stooping to minister at the
altar of Mammon, and victimize the working classes; boasting of moral
force, and labouring hard to put the people beyond the reach of its
power!
It is said, “The rich break the Sabbath, and that many professing
Christians pay little attention to its sacred dictates”; _ergo_, the poor
man must be robbed of his day of rest! This, my Lord, is the logic of
your friends, as though doubling or trebling a crime could consecrate it.
Every Sabbath breaker, whether monarch, lord, priest, or pretended saint,
is really and truly a Sabbath breaker, and therefore is no Christian; and
as a thousand thefts or murders cannot sanctify one, so thousands or
millions of acts of Sabbath desecration cannot alter God’s law or man’s
physical constitution. There stands the law engraved on man’s muscles,
nerves, and brain; and written also by the same Divine Physiologist and
Lawgiver in the sacred volume: “Remember the day of rest”—“in it thou
shalt do no manner of work,” &c., are the words; and woe be to him who
dares break this “commandment, or teach men to do so.”
I was surprised to read in several newspapers the reasons which you, my
Lord, assigned for granting a charter for this Sabbath cruelty. You
stated that you wished to open the Palace for “the HEALTH, COMFORT, and
MORALS of the people.” I confess that I hardly believed my own eyes, and
I perused several reports of your speech before I gave them credit. But
let us examine them a little.
I. Sabbath desecration for “_the health of the people_”: that is, you
propose to shorten the lives of one class of men, for the supposed health
of others! This is not very humane. And then, Sabbath desecration
injures rather than promotes health. This was shown long since in the
Parliamentary evidence on the observance of the Sabbath. Masters who
employ large bodies of men, know full well how to distinguish the workman
who spends his Sabbath in a moral and religious manner, from those who
pass it in tea gardens, travelling, and dissipation. The latter are said
to be frequently “not worth their salt” on a Monday; while the former are
healthy, strong, and vigorous for labour, showing that the Sabbath has
had its intended refreshing, re-creating, and quickening influence on
their bodies, minds, and morals. There is plenty of Sabbath amusement in
Paris and on the Continent; but then many of these poor creatures are
half dead on the morrow, and require a Saint Monday to restore them. The
bills of mortality also of London, for many years past, without a Crystal
Palace, will bear comparison with any of the great cities abroad. And
if, my Lord, you will obtain correct statistics of the health and
longevity in the metropolis or the country of those who break and of
those who rigidly observe the Sabbath, you will never say another word
about Sabbath desecration as necessary to health. I am quite willing to
stake the whole question on the health of the Sabbath School teachers of
London. With all due deference, you must allow us to believe that the
Great Physiologist who made man’s body and breathed into it an immortal
soul, was not inattentive to our health and life, when he gave the Fourth
Commandment; and certainly viewed the human family with as much
tenderness as the Earl of Derby.
II. Sabbath desecration for “_the comfort of the people_.” Of course,
my Lord, you intended to omit the comfort of the men and their wives and
families who are to be employed in the Sydenham speculation. These poor
creatures will have little comfort on the Sabbath. The father will be at
work and the family will be at home bereft of its best friend. And then
as to the others, who are to be amused and comforted, I am prepared to
show that the families of those who keep the Sabbath are ten thousand
times more comfortable than of those who break it. Let the homes of the
working men in England who observe the Lord’s-day, be examined in
connection with the homes of labourers and artisans on the continent, and
we do not fear what will be the result of such an investigation even in
this single matter of comfort. Yes, and let Spitalfields be scrutinized,
and a fair report be given of the condition of those who keep, and of
those who break the Sabbath, and, my Lord, the comparison will most
triumphantly prove that there can be a far higher degree of comfort
enjoyed from religion than any Crystal Palace can yield. There are
hundreds of happy families in Spitalfields and elsewhere, who are happy
because they are pious and keep the Lord’s-day holy. To them the Sabbath
is a foretaste and earnest of heaven. When the morning of the day of
rest dawns, they hail it with the words of Newton,
“How welcome to the saint, when pressed
With six days’ care and pain and toil,
Is the reviving day of rest,
Which hides him from the world awhile!”
Or else they sing, with Watts,
“Welcome, sweet day of rest,
That saw the Lord arise,
Welcome to this reviving breast
And these rejoicing eyes”!!!
Among these poor people you will find some of the happiest persons upon
the face of the globe, and in their homes ten times more comfort than is
enjoyed by their Sabbath breaking neighbours who have better wages.
Keeping the Sabbath aright invariably leads to domestic comfort and
happiness; while breaking it, as certainly produces misery; and
therefore, my Lord, it was bad domestic, bad political economy; bad
physiology, bad morality and divinity to talk of increasing the comforts
of the people by Sabbath dissipation. All history, all statistics, all
observation, all nations, all Scripture are against your proposition.
III. Sabbath desecration for “_The Morality of the People_!!” This, my
Lord, is certainly the climax of all. We used to be sent to the “Newgate
Calendar,” and were told that Sabbath breaking led to all sorts of vice,
but now the tables are turned, and working on the Sabbath and the neglect
of divine worship and religious instruction are to bring the Millennium!
You have been, my Lord, in France and especially in Paris on the Sabbath.
There they have all sorts of pleasure gardens, costly trees and shrubs,
museums, picture galleries, crystal fountains, &c., &c., open to all the
public without a fee on the Sabbath. The Palais Royal; the Palace of
Vendôme; the Palace of the Tuileries, and its gardens; and the Champs
Elysées, with its splendid walks, will perhaps bear comparison with
anything we shall have at Sydenham; and I certainly never expect to see
any exhibition in this country that will vie with the palaces,
waterworks, and illuminations at Versailles and St. Cloud. These, my
Lord, have been for years thrown open to the people. France from time
immemorial has been renowned for its popular amusements and Sunday sights
and recreations, and yet these did not save the nation from “_Sans
Culottism_,” “The Reign of Terror,” and all sorts of mad revolutions.
With all these grand sights and the morality of Sabbath breaking, the
French and the Continentals cannot be trusted with scarcely a particle of
liberty, but must be kept in order with the bayonet; while your own
immoral countrymen, who are in danger of becoming savages without a
Crystal Palace, know so well how to take care of themselves that you
trusted the Crystal Palace in their hands without a single soldier to
protect it. With these facts before us, it sounds rather strange to hear
your Lordship talk of improving the morality of the people by Sabbath
desecration, when it is as clear as any fact of the present time that we
owe our morality, our national contentment, security, progress, and
preeminence, to our observance of the Lord’s-day. Do away with the
Sabbath, my Lord, and Sans Culottism may yet reign in England, even
though the Sydenham Palace may very far surpass Versailles and St. Cloud.
But if Crystal Palaces have such virtue that a visit once or twice a year
to its gardens will make the vilest of the people moral, I am thinking,
my Lord, that some will begin to imagine that we may soon dispense with
archbishops, bishops, deans, and all the other expensive apparatus of a
State Establishment. We may be sure that not one in ten of those who go
to Sydenham will think of going to church before they start on the
railway. Indeed, many argue that the Palace is to be opened to moralize
and spiritualize those who will not at the present time enter our
churches or chapels. And this said Sydenham is to perform such marvels
in virtue and piety as Joanna Southcott and Mormonites never ventured
even in their wildest flights to anticipate. And if so, why not plant
gardens, construct fountains, and erect Crystal Palaces generally? Many
of the clergy and dissenting ministers we are told have miserable
congregations at present: why not make them porters and waiters at
Sydenham, seeing railway men, it is supposed, will produce more morality
in a few hours than some of your clergy and dissenting ministers can call
forth in many years? And if the plan will work so well in the afternoon,
why not have it in the morning? and then there will be no need of mocking
the Almighty by praying for grace to keep the Fourth Commandment at the
moment that we intend to trample it under our feet. Depend upon it, my
Lord, there are not a few who will conclude that under such a moral and
religious dispensation as that which the Crystal Palace adventurers have
proposed to bring in, the property of the Church may go to pay off the
national debt.
I may have seemed to treat this matter with levity, but was it possible
to discuss such arguments with seriousness? to talk of gardens, &c.,
producing morality, when history shows us what architecture, pleasure
grounds, and such like inventions did for Egypt, Nineveh, Babylon, Rome,
and other countries, who with all these incentives to piety became the
victims of their own vices? But I will not enlarge except to say that
you cannot, my Lord, follow a better guide than the Bible, nor confer a
greater boon on the nation than to preserve its Sabbaths from being
violated by labour. I have now been nearly thirty years at Ebley, and
during that time have preached to a large congregation, most of them poor
people, and have had ample opportunity of seeing the effects of Sabbath
breaking and Sabbath observance. I am told that our chapel and schools,
as seen from the Great Western Railway, look like a little paradise, and
I could show your Lordship as many happy homes as perhaps any minister in
any agricultural and manufacturing district in the country. I wish your
Lordship would send a commissioner to look at us, for we could then prove
by visible facts, that “health,” “comfort,” “morality,” intelligence and
pure religion flow, and flow alone, from strict obedience to the Fourth
Commandment. I had intended to say more to prove that the keeping of the
seventh day is as obligatory now as in the days of Moses, but I will
reserve those arguments for a separate essay, and in the meantime remain,
my Lord,
Your Lordship’s obedient Servant,
B. PARSONS.
EBLEY, STROUD, GLOUCESTERSHIRE,
_March_ 10_th_, 1853.
P.S.—I ought, my Lord, to have added above that some persons, from this
expected rage of the poor people to go to the Crystal Palace on Sundays,
and its moralizing influence, will draw an argument in favour of the
Voluntary Principle in religion which your Lordship has so long
condemned. For if these children of destitution will pay such large sums
to be educated and moralized at Sydenham, what need of State Education,
tithes, or religious endowments? I should not be surprised to hear it
proposed to have St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey turned into Crystal
Palaces. In making these remarks I am only reasoning on the premises
laid down by your Lordship, that the people would be rendered “_moral_”
by going to the Crystal Palace on Sundays. Bishops, priests, deacons,
and dissenting ministers, it is presumed, have failed; and now dram shops
are to be emptied, and Spitalfields, St. Giles, and Rosemary Lane
regenerated by the Sydenham grounds! Certainly, my Lord, before this new
experiment is tried, it would be well to inquire, whether the Bible,
Christianity, and Religious Instruction are a failure? whether Sabbath
breaking will be more moralizing than Sabbath observance? whether the
poor people in London will have money enough to go in shoals to Sydenham?
and whether those who will really go will not be the persons who have
ample time and means to go on the week?
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London: Printed for John Snow, 35, Paternoster Row.