Part 1

Transcribed from the 1853 John Snow edition by David Price, email [email protected]

[Picture: Book cover]

A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF DERBY, ON THE CRUELTY AND INJUSTICE OF OPENING THE CRYSTAL PALACE ON THE SABBATH.

“Remember the Day of Rest to keep it holy.”—_Fourth Commandment_.

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”—_The Gospels_.

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BY THE REV. B. PARSONS, OF EBLEY;

AUTHOR OF “ANTI-BACCHUS;” “THE MENTAL AND MORAL DIGNITY OF WOMAN;” “EDU- CATION THE NATURAL WANT OF EVERY HUMAN BEING;” “THE GREATNESS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE TRACED TO ITS PRINCIPAL SOURCES;” ETC. ETC.

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LONDON: JOHN SNOW, 35, PATERNOSTER ROW; BUCKNALL & HARMER, STROUD; AND ALL BOOKSELLERS.

1853.

_Price One Shilling_.

A LETTER, _&c._ _&c._

MY LORD,

Divided as the country is in its political and religious sentiments, there is one subject on which there is a very great unanimity: and I may add also that this union of opinion exists among the most moral of your countrymen; the most loyal supporters of the throne and the constitution; the most enlightened members of the community; and the most benevolent and philanthropic individuals in the empire. I need not say that the point on which all these persons are agreed is “THE OBSERVANCE OF SABBATH.” Here, my Lord, you have thousands or rather millions of citizens who never trouble the realm in any way by their vices or disorderly conduct; who are never brought before magistrates or judges for their offences; and who require no soldiers or police to watch over them and keep them from disturbing the commonwealth.

It is a matter of surprise to all sober and reflecting minds that you, my Lord, should wish to set yourself in an attitude of antagonism towards all these peaceful and religious men and women; and especially that you should do this most _gratuitously_ and in _defiance of your own creed_.

In proposing to have the Pleasure Grounds of the new Crystal Palace thrown open during one half of the Lord’s-day, you involved yourself in a responsibility which no one called upon you to incur, except a small body of railway speculators, and a few theoretic and practical rejectors of the commandments of the Most High. Your coadjutors and instigators are those who never allow a word of Scripture to stand in the way of their views, their pleasures, their prejudices, or their love of gain. It has become popular of late years for prime ministers “to do evil that good may come.” The Maynooth grant was asked for by few. The Catholics themselves did not want it. There has rarely been a measure which met with such unanimous opposition; but still it was carried—_most tyrannically_ carried—in defiance of the voice of the nation: and, how has it worked? The believers in Roman Catholicism knew that it was intended as a bribe, and therefore an insult; and have resolved that they will not be converted into spiritual chattels, or have their zeal quenched or consciences silenced by Government pay. The money was taken from our pockets to purchase state patronage for the premier and his partisans, but the artifice has proved a perfect failure, for the followers of _Pio Nono_ have shown that they are not to be bought. Your measure, my Lord, concerning the Sabbath is as perfectly gratuitous as the Maynooth scheme.

I. In wishing to grant a charter for the violation of the Lord’s-day, you, my Lord, tried to play the same game as your predecessors. The profit of a small company of railway kings was the chief thing sought; and to obtain their smile, you were willing to risk the favour of the King of Kings, to endanger the morals of the country, and consequently the Throne, the Constitution, and the Church; and you were also setting yourself in an attitude of defiance against the best and most patriotic of your countrymen. There might, my Lord, have been boldness in this effort of yours to undermine the Sabbath and trample upon the consciences of the majority of the nation, but the infatuation was equal to the courage. You have long been ambitious of power. The deep and settled opinion in your own mind for a long time has been, that both as a profoundly wise and apostolically religious man, you, my Lord, and you alone, were the _only_ person in the realm qualified to guide the affairs of this great empire. Your Lordship has for some years put yourself forward as the bulwark of the Church and of pure Christianity. All persons who differed from you have been viewed as heretics and sinners exceedingly; and you are, according to your own showing, a model saint, the moral hero and spiritual Wellington of religion and the Bible; and yet, after all these high pretensions, no sooner were you in power than your first effort on behalf of Christianity was to announce to the country that you were about to set the authority of your royal mistress against the command of the King of Heaven; and, in doing so, you alienated from yourself and your administration the minds of the majority of the religious people whom you promised to serve if you could only obtain the reins of government.

By many of the most devout members of your Church, your premiership was hailed as the advent of another Luther or Wickliffe, and you covered all these with chagrin and shame by your gratuitous violation of the law of the Most High. There never was a specimen of greater infatuation in a statesman who aimed at popularity and almost vaunted of preeminence in religious zeal. You, my Lord, great as your power may have been, were hardly high enough to despise the favour or indignation of the Ruler of the Universe. Read history, my Lord, and you cannot find a single Sabbath breaking nation but has paid dearly for its ungodliness. The Lord’s-day, scripturally observed, would have saved France from the convulsions and bloodshed which have made it a warning to the world. Sabbath breaking sent the Jews to Babylon, and gave them seventy years of captivity that “the land might enjoy her Sabbath,” and that all ages might learn that the Almighty will not have His commands set at nought with impunity.

But supposing you had possessed such power that you could have said, “_I fear not God_,” yet sound policy might have suggested that it would be well to have some “_regard to man_.” You really were not quite secure in your post as prime minister. A few votes of the senate deprived you in an instant of all your authority; and you fell because you rendered yourself unpopular in the estimation of the nation. You ought also to know that religion is a sacred thing in the eyes of all, whether Pagans, Jews, Mahommedans, or Christians. To touch the ark has brought destruction upon many an “Uzzah” without any special intervention of heaven; and you, my Lord, are not too high for their doom. The majority which sustained you in office was very small and doubtful; and nothing sunk you so low in the estimation of thousands as this Sabbath desecration, which you proposed to establish by a royal charter!! By many you were looked upon as the bulwark of the Church and religion; and by your own speeches you wished to make the country believe that you were a very godly man; and yet without the least substantial reason you blasted all their hopes, and, in their estimation, you have denied the faith, and become worse than an infidel—because an _unbeliever_ has no reverence, and can have no reverence for the Word of God; but you profess to _believe_ in its divine origin, and to be guided by its sacred injunctions, and thus sinned with your eyes open: you have therefore foolishly, most gratuitously, alienated your friends, and hastened your own downfal, and all to please the avarice and fill the coffers of a small clique of gentlemen who prefer “gain to godliness.”

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II. You have not only been guilty of the most gratuitous presumption and rashness, but you have also acted in defiance of your own creed. You, my Lord, according to your own showing, are a very religious, indeed, an apostolically religious, man—a believer in the Church Catechism, and in the doctrine of confirmation. Doubtless your Lordship has been confirmed; and I may presume that you go to church as often as the majority of your order; and, when there, you listen very attentively to the reading of the decalogue, and after each precept you most devoutly and sincerely repeat the prayer, “_Lord have mercy upon us_, _and incline our hearts to keep this law_!” At the end of the tenth command you vary the words, and say, “_Lord have mercy upon us_, AND WRITE ALL THESE THY LAWS IN OUR HEARTS, WE BESEECH THEE.”

In the Communion Service of the Prayer Book, I read the following words:—“Then shall the priest, turning to the people, rehearse distinctly ALL THE TEN commandments; and the _people_, _still kneeling_, shall after _every_ commandment _ask mercy for their transgression_ thereof, and grace to _keep_ the same for time to come.” In accordance with this direction the clergyman in a solemn voice commences with Exodus xx. 1: “GOD SPAKE THESE WORDS AND SAID;” and thus wishes to impress upon the devout and kneeling audience before him, that the laws which he is about to rehearse are the identical laws which were once proclaimed by Jehovah himself, and that they have now all the majesty and authority of the Divine Legislator which they have ever had. When he comes to the _fourth_, he reads, “Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day. Six days shalt thou labour, and do _all_ that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work, _thou_, and thy son, and thy daughter, thy man servant, and thy maid servant, thy cattle, and the 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 seventh day, and hallowed it.” No sooner are these words ended, than you, my Lord, and all true Churchmen, all newspaper editors and railway directors, who go to church on Sunday mornings, repeat the solemn prayer given above. In the sentence, “_Lord have mercy upon us_,” you confess that you have broken the commandment, and pray the God of Heaven to grant you “_mercy_” for the past; and in the following words, “_Incline our hearts to keep this law_,” you entreat Jehovah to renew your hearts, and give you an inclination to obey the “_Fourth Commandment_” in future. Are you, my Lord, sincere in this prayer and supplication? Are your Church friends among the nobility, railway companies, and newspaper editors, who use this form of devotion, sincere? The Son of God tests our love by our obedience. “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” are his sacred injunctions, plainly teaching us that if we violate his commands we give a public demonstration that we do not love him. Now, to keep the Sabbath _one half_ of the day and violate it the other, is to furnish but a very poor proof that we feel any deference for the Fourth Commandment.

My Lord, would you be satisfied that your commands to your servants should be _half_ broken and _half_ kept? Are you pleased with your coachman if he drives you _half_ way to church on the Sabbath when your command is to be driven _all_ the way? Do you like to have your will in any other particular but _half_ done? Would you be pleased to have your hunters and racehorses but _half_ fed and _half_ groomed, or your food but _half_ cooked? Yet we may ask, Who is the Earl of Derby, that his commands should be _perfectly_ obeyed to the very letter, while the God of Heaven, at the instance of this same Earl of Derby, is to be satisfied with only a moiety of that obedience which he has enjoined in the Scripture?

What, my Lord, if you comprehended all your own wishes in “_Ten Commands_,” and summoned all your servants into your presence once a week and directed your chief steward to read in their ears your injunctions, commencing with the sentence, “The Earl of Derby spake these words and said”; and what if all your attendants fell on their knees before you, and, in the most pitiful language, confessed that they had rebelled against your precepts; implored mercy for their transgressions; earnestly entreated you to assist them in their future efforts to do your pleasure; and, having satisfied themselves that you had pardoned them, immediately rose from the ground and resolved in future to be more guilty than ever by neglecting your commands altogether, or by only attending to _half_ their import! Could you put up, my Lord, with this farce week after week and year after year? Would it require fifty-two repetitions of such insolence to exhaust your patience? Would the Earl of Derby allow himself to be thus insulted even a second time? Would you not denounce these impudent menials as a set of mocking hypocrites? But is it a matter of more importance that the Earl of Derby should not be mocked than that the God of Heaven should be worshipped in sincerity and in truth? Let me then entreat your Lordship, as you value your present consistency and future happiness, either to reverence the Fourth Commandment, or else cease to use the prayer attached to it in the Liturgy.

But perhaps you may say, “that you neither disobey it, nor teach others to do so.” I need not tell your Lordship, as a learned man, and the Chancellor of one of the great seats of learning, that the day mentioned by Moses, and which you pray the Almighty to give you grace to observe, is TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LONG; that during these twenty-four hours we are commanded to abstain from all manner of work; that we are “to keep the day holy to Jehovah,” and consequently to observe it religiously by not “doing our own ways, finding our own pleasure, or speaking our own words.” Such is the command of the King of Kings. How then can the _half_ observance of the Lord’s-day be reconciled with the divine command to keep the _whole_? If the railway to Sydenham is to be worked on the Sabbath, and the pleasure grounds thrown open, you will of necessity doom a large number of clerks, stokers, drivers, porters, waiters and others to labour on that day on which Jehovah has commanded that no work shall be done. The God of Heaven says, “Thou shalt do no manner of work”; but the Earl of Derby tells the people that they _may_ work on the Sabbath! You thus set yourself in a position of antagonism against the Creator of the Universe. The Scriptures assert that “The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath”; but you, my Lord, intimate that the Earl of Derby is the Lord of the Sabbath!! When “God spake,” he solemnly commanded that the _whole_ day should be observed; but when the Earl of Derby spoke, he said “_Let half the day be kept_,” thus making himself not only equal but superior to the Almighty!

It is no use, my Lord, to plead that only a few hands comparatively will be employed, because you have no right to doom even _one_ man to lose his day of rest and sin against God, for the gain and gratification of others. One soul is of more value than the whole world; and I query whether your Lordship will be willing to stand at the bar of the Eternal in the stead of the poor labourers whom you condemned to toil on the seventh day, and thus converted into Sabbath breakers. And it would not be one, two, or ten, who would be robbed of the rest of the Sabbath, but the opening the grounds at Sydenham on Sunday would be the condemnation of hundreds of our countrymen to this seventh-day slavery. Why should railway companies be permitted to exact Sunday labour from their servants, and yet grocers, drapers, tradesmen, and manufacturers be prohibited from similar gains? The age is passing away for legislative favouritism; and if one company may have royal authority to work, oppress and destroy their vassals, why should not all the shops be thrown open: why should not the anvil, the saw and the spade be used, and all apprentices and labourers be called upon to be Sunday slaves? Such labour will minister to the pleasure and profit of many. It is rather remarkable, that almost the same day in which your good lady was announced, in connection with the Duchess of Sutherland and others, as an opponent to American slavery, you, my Lord, proclaimed yourself as the patron of English slavery! and might have founded your arguments on the same principles as the Transatlantic planters. Uncle Tom was enslaved for the profit and pleasure of his masters; and clerks, drivers, stokers, &c., &c., are to be enslaved on the Sabbath to enrich their employers, and to minister to the gratification of the irreligious portion of the community who “are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.” Indeed, the American slave in many instances is allowed his full day of rest on the Sabbath; but the white slave of the railway and of Sydenham is to know nothing of the repose of that day which Jehovah has set apart for the benefit not only of the sons and daughters of toil, but also of animals, for it was one of God’s commands to the Jews that “the ox and the ass should rest.”

Of course, my Lord, if you persevere now you are out of office, in this wish to have the Sabbath desecrated, you will also, in accordance with your public DISSENT from the Church of England, demand that the Prayer Book shall be altered. You will for consistency sake request the Convocation, to which you are said to be very favourable, to immediately set about the re-formation of the Liturgy as their very first work. By all means let the Fourth Commandment be omitted from the Catechism; let all reference to it be erased from the Baptismal Service; let sponsors no longer be called upon “to promise and vow” that their godchildren shall “keep God’s holy will and commandments and walk in the same all the days of their life”; and, in the service of Confirmation, let the candidates be duly taught that in taking their vows upon them, they are, on the authority of the Earl of Derby, freed from the observance of the Sabbath; let the priests of the Church also be informed that to read the Fourth Commandment is an absurdity now it is abolished; and above all, never again let heaven be mocked, piety outraged, and common sense insulted by the repetition of the prayer, “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” Why should not a second book of sports be read from the pulpits of the Establishment, and the people be duly apprised that the words of the Eternal respecting the seventh day, “In it thou shalt do no manner of work, _thou_, nor _thy son_, nor _thy daughter_, _thy man servant_, _thy maid servant_, _thy cattle_, and _the stranger_ within thy gates,” are now of no force, for the Earl of Derby has proclaimed that railway speculators may compel their servants to work on the seventh day, and as a consequence that all other persons may “go and do likewise”?

You have, my Lord, by your changing, often surprised your countrymen; but this wish to trample the Prayer Book in the dust, to set Baptism, Catechism, Confirmation, the Communion Service, and the Word of God at defiance, is a revolution which none of your friends or foes were prepared to expect, and should you succeed will be attended with greater evils to the masses and greater calamities to the nation than have ever yet occurred. England owes all to her Bible and her Sabbaths; and I may add, that the Scriptures would have been of little good without her _Sabbaths_. Abolish, my Lord, the rest of the seventh day, and you may write “Ichabod” on our walls. The Bible has been but partially studied by those nations who reject the Lord’s-day, and their history and present condition show that they have paid very dearly for this neglect.

But, my Lord, if you have power, supposing you were prime minister, to annul the Fourth Commandment, then you have power to abolish all the rest. If you can command that the Sabbath shall be _half_ kept and can give men a charter to break the other _half_, you certainly have power to allow them to break it altogether; and if you can grant a royal commission to violate _one_ precept of the decalogue, you can license the people to break the whole. And, my Lord, you must not stop, for there are persons to whom the _Sixth_, the _Seventh_ and _Eighth_ Commandments are as great an obstruction to their profit or pleasure as the Fourth Command is to the Sydenham gentlemen. How many thieves could enrich themselves but for the Eighth Command; and how many might relieve themselves of the burden of dependents or jump into rich inheritances, by trampling the Sixth in the dust! Yea, my Lord, were they only allowed by a royal charter to violate one _half_ of these commandments, by half starving, half killing and half robbing their fellow creatures, no one can tell the property that might be saved or gained. Here would be a “MAGNA CHARTA” with a vengeance, and one, my Lord, which would immortalize your name to all eternity. The dead, by the million, would proclaim your fame or your infamy. And there can be no just reason given why, if you granted a charter to railway speculators to enable them to rob their servants of the Sabbath, you should not give other worshippers of Mammon equal power to plunder and oppress; for I shall presently have to show that to deprive the physical frame of rest once in seven days is both robbery and murder, and therefore if you begin to charter these outrages, you will find it difficult to stop. It will be only for any company to make out a case and prove that _pleasure_ and _profit_ will be the result of oppression, robbery and death, and you, to be consistent, must advocate their cause.

The change in The Prayer Book too must be greater than at first was contemplated. Instead of praying “Lord have mercy upon us, and write ALL these THY commandments in our hearts, we beseech thee”; or, when the fourth is abolished, “Lord have mercy upon us, and write NINE of these THY commandments in our hearts, we beseech thee,” you will have to obliterate them from the Liturgy altogether. And indeed wherever in the prayers, thanksgivings, or collects there is any reference to the commandments of Jehovah, the words must be omitted in the re-formed Prayer Book. Of course, my Lord, after this great and stupendous change, we shall hear no more of the heresy of Nonconformists, and the wonder of modern times will be, not, “Is Saul among the prophets?” but, “Is the Earl of Derby among dissenters?”