Part 1

Transcribed from the 1852 Nisbet and Co. edition by David Price, email [email protected], using scans from the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

[Picture: Pamphlet cover]

THE NEW CRYSTAL PALACE AND THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH.

BY THE REV. JOHN WEIR, MINISTER OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, RIVER TERRACE.

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LONDON: N. H. COTES, 139, CHEAPSIDE; NISBET AND CO., BERNERS STREET; J. H. JACKSON, PATERNOSTER ROW, AND ISLINGTON GREEN

1852.

(Price 1d., or 7s. per 100.)

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I AM very sensible of the imperfections of the following Discourse (delivered on the 24th ult.), but in compliance with the request of many friends, it is now issued in a tract form, as an humble testimony to “present truth” and present duty, and with the earnest prayer that it may be of some service to the cause of the Christian Sabbath.

J. W.

Islington, 3rd November, 1852.

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LONDON: C. RICHARDS, 100, ST. MARTIN’S LANE.

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THE NEW CRYSTAL PALACE AND THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH.

ISAIAH V. 24.—“Therefore, as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust, because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.”

LUKE XVI. 13.—“Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.”

2 TIMOTHY III. 4.—“Lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God: from such turn away.”

A SIMULTANEOUS effort is this day being made in this parish, by ministers of various sections of the one Church of Christ, to direct public attention to a question of no ordinary magnitude, with which the cause of national righteousness is identified; and to stir up the community to unite in vigorous, yet peaceful opposition to a project, which involves the perpetration of a great national sin.

Most of those now present have gazed with admiration on the marvels of the memorable and magnificent Crystal Palace of 1851, the design of which originated with the same Prince who, in his homage to the Supreme Ruler of nations, had previously suggested as an appropriate motto for our Royal Exchange the words now graven on its pediment: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” It was in beautiful harmony with this recognition of the sovereignty of Heaven, and it formed one of its most gratifying features, that the doors of the Crystal Palace were closed on the Lord’s day. England thus solemnly proclaimed to assembled nations that she exalted the spiritual above the material—the eternal above the temporal—the immortal above the perishable—in a word, by this public acknowledgment of the Divine law, the Royal Commissioners, in the nation’s name, put honour on the Sabbath of God.

The gorgeous fabric, whose wonders had attracted myriads of spectators, having fulfilled its design, by exhibiting in peaceful rivalry the products of genius, and science, and industrial skill, collected from all nations, was ordered to be taken down. Many were anxious for its preservation; meetings were held and petitions presented to the Legislature on the subject; but it was finally decided, by a vote of the House of Commons, that, in accordance with the terms of the original agreement, the structure should be removed. The directors of a railway company then resolved to purchase the materials, and reconstruct the edifice on a new site, in an improved and more enduring form, and on a scale of unprecedented magnificence and splendour. In connection with this movement, a crisis most grave and momentous has come upon us, fraught with the elements of danger to our national Sabbath, and to that morality and social order which largely depend on its due observance. It is stated, with an air of authority, by the press, that an application has been made to the Prime Minister of the country for a charter of incorporation, enabling the company to open the Crystal Palace, under Royal sanction, on the afternoon of the Lord’s day; that he has signified his acquiescence, and that the responsible advisers of the Crown are prepared to recommend the granting of the charter, with the required licence. It, therefore, becomes the duty of every Christian in the land, who rejoices in the blessed privileges of the Sabbath, to plead for its full and faithful observance. True it is that some concessions are made, in apparent deference to the religious feelings of the community. It is proposed that no train shall run before one o’clock on the Lord’s day; that after that hour the public shall be admitted only to the park and to that portion of the palace called the Winter Garden; whilst the compartments devoted exclusively to productions of manufacturing and commercial industry shall be closed; and further, the directors undertake that on the Sabbath day no spirituous liquors shall be sold in the grounds. But notwithstanding these plausible concessions, nay all the more because of the false principles which I am persuaded they involve, I still regard the proposition with abhorrence, as opposed to an express command of Heaven, and I stand here to-night, resolved in the strength of God to lift up a solemn protest against it, and to urge on all who hear me the necessity of endeavouring, by dutiful remonstrance, to prevent the systematic violation of God’s law under the sanction of the executive authority of the realm.

There are certain leading ideas suggested by the passages I have read, which bear upon the subject now before us. It is clearly indicated that the law of God cannot be despised or violated by any nation without bringing down upon it the righteous judgments of Heaven (this being especially true with regard to the transgression of the law of the Sabbath), and it is also taught that the service which God demands is such as will admit of no compromise, either with the claims of covetousness on the one hand, or with the pursuit of sinful pleasure on the other.

I. _The Law of God cannot be violated by any nation_, _without exposing it to the righteous judgments of Heaven_. This is a great principle repeatedly laid down in Scripture, and fully authenticated by the facts of history. It holds true with regard to individuals as well as nations, and is abundantly illustrated by the course of events in the natural as well as in the spiritual world. There are fixed laws which regulate the phenomena of the sun and the solar system, by which the planets move in their orbits, and all derive light and heat from the king of day; and if it were possible to disturb this harmony by any dislocating force, then all things in the universe would be out of place, and “chaos” would “come again.” There are fixed laws, also, by which health and life are regulated, protected, and preserved, any violation of which brings its own punishment. You cannot take up fire without being burned, for it is the property of fire to burn; you cannot handle the venomous serpent, and expect that it will not pierce you with its deadly fangs; for it is the nature of the serpent—the very law of its life—to poison and destroy. You cannot eat or drink to excess, without deranging that beautiful concord of the bodily organs which constitutes health, and bringing on yourself disease and premature death. And if we turn to the spiritual world, we shall find similar results. Sin is the spiritual serpent which poisons and destroys the life of the soul. Extend its baneful influence from the individual to a family, all are brought under its blight and curse. And so it is of communities and nations, which are aggregates of individuals, and subject, in their collective capacity, to the same law. The kingdoms of the earth are placed under the eye and control of Him who is Governor among the nations, and to whom they are under solemn responsibilities. “Righteousness exalteth a nation, whilst sin is the reproach (as well as the ruin) of any people.” Let it not be forgotten that the Lord Jesus Christ is “King of nations,” as well as “King of saints;” and oftentimes, in the history of the world, have his judgments been made manifest. Seated on his mediatorial throne, “all power is given unto him in heaven and in earth.” The nation or kingdom that will not serve him “shall be utterly wasted;” and history, we repeat, has fearfully attested the exercise of his dread authority, and the vindication of his prerogative to “root out, to pull down, and to destroy” the despisers of his law.

Thus it was that God dealt with the heathen nations of Canaan. The “iniquity of the Amorites” was “not yet full” when He made a covenant with Abraham, subsequently renewed to Jacob at the foot of the mystic ladder; but the cup was filled up to overflowing when Joshua crossed the Jordan as Heaven’s own avenger.

It was so with Egypt. She held in iron bondage the people of God, and clung to her abominable idolatry in the worship of birds and beasts and creeping things. Even while by the colony of shepherds, who had migrated from Palestine to Goshen, the light of Divine truth was kindled in her midst, she remained an impenitent rebel; and when ten plagues had wasted her borders, and sent the wail of sore bereavement in one night into every family, the last act in the drama of Divine judgment was consummated in that anger which whelmed the chariots and horsemen and all the hosts of Pharaoh in the surging billows of the Red Sea.

Look, again, at proud Nineveh. Why did she perish? The answer is found in the Divine declaration, “I will make thy grave, for thou art vile.” Yes, so deep did Jehovah dig the dishonoured grave of Nineveh, that only now, at the end of 2500 years, are her obelisks and winged lions—her idol gods of stone, and the engraved memorials of her battles, her sieges, and her victories, disentombed and brought to the light of day, to the confusion of the sceptic, and the confirmation of the “sure word of prophecy.”

And was it not so with Babylon—the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency—which God in his anger made as Sodom and Gomorrah—a solitary waste for owls to dwell therein, and dragons to cry in her pleasant palaces? And if Tyre, once the emporium of commerce, whose “merchants were princes,” and whose “traffickers were the honourable of the earth”—if she has now become a rock on which the fisherman dries his nets;—if the desolate caves and dwellings of Petra, like the eagle’s eyrie “in the sides of the rock,” tell of what Edom once was in the day of her glory and pride;—if the republics of Greece have long since perished under the fierce barbarism of their Moslem invaders;—if Carthage, despite the valour of her sons and the consummate skill of her accomplished chief, fell, trodden to the dust beneath the iron hoof of her victorious rival, Rome;—and if the colossal empire of Rome itself, then the mistress of the world, has crumbled into fragments, bequeathing to the genius of history such ample materials for the wondrous story of her “Decline and Fall;”—if Attila and Alaric were the scourges of God to hasten her downfall;—if, later still, France and Spain and the republics of Italy have been the scene of frightful convulsions and bloody wars, surely these impressive lessons were written on the page of the world’s annals to teach us the solemn truth, that God punishes guilty _nations as such_ for the violation of his laws—that “verily there is a God who judgeth in the earth.”

II. If it be true, in a general sense, that the violation of the laws of God brings wrath upon a people, we have abundant evidence to show that the _violation of the law of the Sabbath_, _in an especial and emphatic manner_, _provokes the Divine judgments_. It was one of the crowning acts of Israel’s wickedness and apostasy that she had ceased to honour the day of God; and one of the causes of the Babylonish captivity was indicated in the awful charge, “My Sabbaths have they greatly polluted.” And so you find that when God assigns the period of Israel’s bondage in a strange land, by a strong figure He represents the very soil of Canaan as outraged by their past profanation of his holy day, and declares that the land should have her Sabbaths—(that was when the people should be carried away captive to Babylon)—“as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies’ land, then shall the land rest and enjoy her Sabbaths, because ye did not rest in your Sabbaths when ye dwelt upon it.” And how awful was the warning addressed to rebellious Israel by the mouth of Jeremiah: “But if ye will not hearken unto me to hallow the Sabbath day, and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath-day, then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched!” Is all this, I ask, an inexplicable mystery? Has it no instruction for us?—no application to the times in which we live—no voice of warning for our guidance? On the contrary, is it not clear that the fourth commandment in the moral law is what the keystone is to the arch—what the heart is to the bodily frame—what the foundation is to the building, that the observance of this commandment lies at the very basis of national morality and national greatness? And if it be wickedly violated, systematically, deliberately violated under the sanction of human authority, in direct defiance of Divine law, by any people, utter and irretrievable ruin must fall on that guilty nation; the Lord of Hosts will “break the pride of its power,” and bring a sword that shall “avenge the quarrel of his covenant!”

III. Closely connected with the profanation of this day by Israel was _apostasy in religion_. They departed from the cardinal truth of God’s unity to the worship of the “gods many and lords many” of the heathen nations around them. Thus, the sanctuary being forsaken and the Sabbath violated, they gave heed to the instruction of lying and wicked prophets, and a flood of ungodliness was poured all over the land. And even after their return from bondage, the leaven of their wickedness remained—idolatrous alliances, intermarriages with heathen nations, and other crimes, are connected in the sacred history with Sabbath profanation. Hence, Nehemiah, the bold Reformer, records how he contended with the people and even with the nobles of Judah, and how, testifying against their sin, he said unto them, “What evil thing is this ye do and profane the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers thus, and did not our God bring all this evil upon us and upon this city? Yet ye bring more wrath upon Israel by profaning the Sabbath.”

Now, it is precisely so with regard to the Christian Sabbath. A system of spurious Christianity has mutilated it by the sanction of secular occupations and sinful pleasures on that holy day. Romanism, in its ritual and service, is, in itself, a blasphemous worship—its mass idolatry—its priests usurpers of the prerogative of Christ, “the Great High Priest of our profession,” and teachers not of the Gospel of Christ, but of “another gospel”—the devotions of her people are not simple, spiritual, and Bible-taught, but the offspring of fear marked by superstition and self-righteousness, and by the vain repetition of prayers to those who are no more gods than were the dumb idols of ancient Paganism. But, in addition to this, Popery has made void the law of God, the law of the Sabbath, by her traditions, and that in two ways.—1st, She has dragged down this blessed day of God from that place of peculiar glory and grandeur, where Jehovah himself has enthroned it above every other day, and has degraded it to a level with the feasts and fasts of the Romish calendar, making her own numerous holidays of equal authority with the Holy Day of God’s appointment. The consequence is, that, in all Popish countries, the holidays are better observed than the Sabbath, just because superstition and will-worship are dear to the carnal heart.

2nd, She has robbed the law of God of its complete and permanent authority. She has contracted the Scriptural limits of the Sabbath, and made it a _half_ instead of a _whole_ Sabbath. Hence, when the Popish mass is over at noon, the remaining portion of the day is regarded as a holiday. I speak not here of countries like our own, where she accommodates herself to the religious feelings and habits of the community, but of countries where she holds paramount sway. There one-half of the Sabbath is devoted to amusement and sensuous, if not sensual enjoyment. Before famine and pestilence swept the neighbouring island as with “the besom of destruction,” crowds of the population might be found on the Sabbath playing at the game of football, wrestling in the meadow, or drinking and dancing in the public-house, whilst many of the priests were wont, as I have reason to know, to spend the evening of the Sabbath in gay society, and shared in card-playing and carousal. And when we look to France—the military review, the brilliant fête, the opening of a railway, take place on the Sabbath, while the population of Paris is divided between the attractions of Versailles, the Luxembourg, and the Louvre, and the numerous theatres which are thrown open by authority for those who are “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.”

If we go to Rome, the centre and source of that gigantic superstition which flings its dark shadows over the continent of Europe, we find public “lotteries” in active operation on the Sabbath, over which cardinals themselves preside. And in Madrid, after mass is over, the Queen of Spain, surrounded by multitudes of her people, is present at the cruel and revolting bull-fight.

And thus it is everywhere the spirit of Popery to mutilate the Sabbath. If it be said this laxity prevails also in Protestant countries of the continent, for this a twofold reason may be assigned:—first, because the German Reformers, not excepting Luther himself, gave an uncertain sound on the obligations of the Sabbath, and retained so much of the system they had abandoned as to leave to their countrymen a low and imperfect standard of Sabbath observance; and, above all, because the spirit of the Reformation is dead in Germany, Rationalism has taken the place of Evangelism, and “the salt has lost its savour.” It is encouraging to know that, wherever evangelical truth has been revived on the continent, there also is waking up a corresponding zeal for the sanctification of the Lord’s day.

Popery, then, has always robbed God of half his own day; and wherever this sacrilege is perpetrated, His judgments have been poured forth. As is attested by the history of Israel in the days of old, as well as by that of France, and Italy, and Spain, and of our own country in the days of the Stuarts, when semi-Popery tyrannised over its victims in the oppression and murder of the Covenanters of Scotland and of the Puritans of England, when the first Charles perished on the scaffold after long and bloody civil wars, and the second Charles, (whose personal profligacy almost corrupted a whole nation, and who, as Pepys so graphically records,) was smitten by the hand of death as he sat, surrounded by his paramours, at the gambling-table, on the Sabbath eve, in “that glorious gallery” of Whitehall Palace; in the judgments that came upon dynasties and nations, as such, at these and other periods in connexion with Sabbath desecration—we are forcibly reminded that the “Lord of the Sabbath day,” seated at the Father’s right hand, can, as the divine word so awfully expresses it, “strike through kings in the day of His wrath,” and “dash” His enemies “in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”

The whole Sabbath, then, belongs to God; we claim the whole of it for the concerns of the soul and of eternity, and any secular infringement of it must be an act of rebellion against the sovereignty of the Most High.

IV. _The Sabbath law admits of no compromise either with the claims of covetousness on the one hand_, _or of sinful pleasure on the other_. Not with covetousness, for it is written, “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” Often have such compromises been attempted by individuals and by communities, but upon them the God of heaven has ever frowned. Ye railway directors, who overwhelm with a storm of ridicule the faithful few who oppose the running of trains on the Sabbath day, what “fruit have ye had” even as to success in your speculations? Ye “looked for much, and lo! it came to little;” and “why?” saith the Lord of Hosts; “because I did blow upon it.” And are there now men who, while they call their palace “the people’s palace,” and themselves “the poor man’s friends,” yet depend mainly on _the poor man’s shillings_ to swell their dividends? “O! my soul; come not thou into their secret, unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united!”

Neither, again, will this law of the Sabbath “shake hands” with those who “are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.” “From such” an inspired apostle commands us to “_turn away_.” If you consider a whole Sabbath spent devoutly “a weariness,” and say, “When will it be over?”—if you prove by your practice that your attendance on the sanctuary during one part of the Sabbath is regarded by you as a kind of licence to spend the rest of the day in “doing your own pleasure,” then be assured that you furnish a fearful evidence that you are destitute of the spiritual tastes of “the new creature,” and that you are still “in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity!” And let none say that we desire to make the Sabbath a day of gloom and not of gladness. We desire that it should be consecrated to that God whose “ways are pleasantness,” and because it is “the day which the Lord hath made” to exult in its refreshing remembrances, in its blessed privileges, and in its hallowed anticipations. And thus counting the Sabbath “A DELIGHT,” the Christian can exclaim,

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

V. There are _pleas urged on behalf of this movement which demand our notice_. It may be said that “there are already laws on the Statute Book which license the opening of public-houses, the running of railway trains and of steam-boats, and that the sale of Sunday newspapers, and of a host of penny publications, many of which are most noxious in their tendency, is also sanctioned.” We reply that all such laws are unholy, Popish and not Protestant in their spirit and tendency, and that they directly assail the authority and perpetual obligation of the Divine law which says, “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy.” It was in the true spirit of the Reformation that the Founders of the Church of England instructed the minister to rehearse publicly the fourth commandment, and the people to respond, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” It was not from Puritanical strictness or Scottish bigotry, so called, but because the Bible was their pole-star, and the glory of God their aim, that the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, in their “Shorter Catechism,” taught the child to say, “The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting _all that day_, even from such recreations and employments as are lawful on other days, and the spending _the whole time_ in the public and private exercise of God’s worship, except so much as shall be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy.”