Part 2

7. _And if possible, the facts that have been supplied by the testimony of medical and other scientific men have been still more valuable and triumphant._--Recent physiological inquiries have placed it beyond doubt that man needs for repairing the waste of his body not only the nightly repose which night brings him, but, in addition, the weekly rest of a seventh day; and it has been noticed that in many of the industrial departments, especially in the more skilled and delicate forms of industry, there was a perceptible deterioration in what was produced in the last days of the week. Travellers on long journeys who have "rested the first day of the week according to the commandment," have outstripped travellers who pursued their journey on the seventh day, and have reached the end of their journey in far better health and spirits. The railway system itself, which, with all its other high advantages, has done not a little to disturb the integrity of our Sabbath rest, has strangely supplied us with valuable corroboration on this matter; for during the period in which our principal railways were in course of construction in Scotland and England, it was found that the work which those who laboured on Sabbath executed in seven days was generally less in amount and worse in execution than that done by sober, orderly, Sabbath-keeping men in six days.

And the same remark is applicable to labourers with the head as with the hand; for in these days we must extend the phrase, "working men," far beyond the comparatively narrow region of the industrial arts. The statesman or the barrister who does not allow himself the weekly pause in his round of mental labour which the Sabbath of God offers him, soon finds nature punishing him for his disregard of its great laws; and instances are not rare, and some of them stand out as beacons in our modern biography, in which such a course has carried him that followed it, in the very noon-tide of his life, to the maniac's cell or the suicide's grave; while many a noble mind has retained its spring and freshness, and has been able to "serve its generation" to the last, by allowing the Sabbath to interpose its hallowed associations and exercises in the midst of its common and absorbing studies. Our great Coleridge strongly and beautifully said, "I feel as if God, by giving the Sabbath, had given fifty-two springs in the year;" and Isaac Taylor, a very voluminous author, and one of the most popular and philosophical of our theological writers, gives the following as the testimony of his long experience: "I am prepared to affirm that to the studious especially, and whether younger or older, a Sabbath well spent--spent in happy exercises of the heart, devotional and domestic--a Sabbath given to the soul, is the best of all means of refreshment to the mere intellect."

There is a point, moreover, at which the physiology of this great subject touches closely on its moral and religious bearings, for it has been found that physical weariness leads to mental lassitude, and that mental lassitude indisposes the soul to moral considerations. Nor would it be easy to calculate to what an extent the recurrence of the Sabbath, where its hours have been turned to their proper and appointed uses, has been of moral advantage to our commercial men and our merchant princes, checking the fever of reckless speculation, restoring the moral balance of the mind, and "winding up the soul, which the body had poised down, to a higher degree of heavenliness." "A Sunday in solitude," said one of the greatest English statesmen of the last age, "never failed to restore me to myself." Facts like these, which might be almost indefinitely multiplied, do more than demonstrate the inestimable value of the Sabbath: they appear to me to suggest, on their own independent grounds, that an institution possessing such wise and benignant adaptations to our complex nature, must have been appointed by Him that made us and who "knows our frame;" and that "while the Sabbath was made _for_ man, it was not made _by_ him." A great writer on natural religion has founded a beautiful argument for the existence and unity of God, on the adaptation of day and night to the physical nature of man: might not an argument of equal soundness and force for the Divine origin of the Sabbath, be founded on its adaptation to our physical, intellectual, and spiritual nature?

8. But while it is unquestionable that the Sabbath argument has gained a large and permanent addition to its force from the experience and discussions of the last twenty years in Scotland, I have already said enough to apprise you that _this divine and truly beneficent institution is not without its enemies and its dangers_. I shall be forgiven when I express my fear that the increased influx of persons from other countries in which "the day of the Lord" is less honoured and hallowed, has had some effect in lowering the standard of its observance among ourselves.--I do not think that the arguments of ultra-spiritualists, who tell us that every day should be a Sabbath, has had much effect in misleading any who were not already willing to be misled. The device was too transparently shallow to do much harm where it had the characteristic shrewdness of the Scottish mind to deal with it. For why, it was answered, on the same principle, might it not be said that men should be always praying; and that therefore it was unnecessary to have fixed times and places for our secret devotions, and that we ought to dispense with the use of words. It was noticed, moreover, that if things were not sometimes solemnly done, they were likely to be never done, and that "every day a Sabbath" came practically to mean "no Sabbath at all."--At one period the railway system, which attempted to introduce with it railway travelling and traffic on the Lord's day, threatened to do violence to our religions convictions and national habits, and to introduce among us a wide-spread and constantly-growing mischief. But this plague was speedily stayed. The religious traditions of our community proved in most instances too strong for the cupidity of men who seemed prepared to sacrifice the highest interests, and to trample on the most sacred feelings of a whole community, for the sake of a larger annual dividend. The majority of our railways in Scotland do not run trains on Sabbath at all; and this is found to operate with immense gain to the public morals, with no inconvenience to trade or commerce, or even pecuniary loss to the proprietors of those stupendous undertakings.

9. But there is an influence at work which has already in some degree invaded our Sabbath-keeping in Scotland, and which I fear is working far more extensive and serious moral havoc in England. _I refer to the attempt which is made in so many places, and by so many parties, to use the day which has been given for sacred rest and religious worship, as a day of entertainment and amusement._--Picture galleries, Crystal palaces, museums of nature and art, or romantic scenes to which men can be carried in crowds by Sunday excursion-trains, are sought to be substituted for visits to the house of prayer, and for Christian instruction and worship. The argument for this insidious and perilous exchange is sometimes put in a kind of religious phraseology, as if these visits to beautiful scenes in nature were only the introduction to another kind of worship, and as if gazing upon the master-pieces of human art in painting, or sculpture, or architecture, exercised a purifying and elevating influence on the mind; and sometimes again it is dressed in the form of a spurious philanthropy, though it is found that those who are the most earnest advocates for the Crystal Palace or the Sabbath excursion-train, generally expect to derive pecuniary advantage from the practice. There never was an argument more triumphantly met by sound philosophy, or more completely refuted by experience. There is no denying, indeed, that visits to high works of art, to objects of curiosity, or to beautiful scenes in the natural world, may at their own time, and in their own place, be beneficial to the busiest and the poorest. But those who imagine that any of these things are capable, in any degree, of being a substitute for the weekly-recurring exercises of Christian worship, and instruction in the great truths of divine revelation, are strangely ignorant of the greatest wants and necessities of man. Who ever heard of looking upon pictures and images, however much they might breathe with genius, transforming the vile to pure, the earthly to divine! It is not by such appliances as these that the heart of any man has ever been made anew. The fact is, it is rather the ├Žsthetic than the moral part of our nature that is influenced by them at all. They refine, but they cannot transform. They may "form the capital of the column, but not its base." The city of Munich contains one of the grandest picture-galleries in Europe, and it is also one of the most demoralized and debased of our European communities. The brigands around Rome were accustomed at the Carnival to visit the picture-galleries in that city, and many shewed high appreciation and discrimination in judging of the works both of ancient and of modern painters, but these influences never succeeded in wooing one of them from his life of violence and crime. And if the history of ancient Greece in its decay reads one lesson to the world more loudly than another, it is this, that refinement of taste may be associated in the same individual and people with the greatest debasement and corruption of morals.

And experience in our own island confirms us in the assertion, that these things are impotent for the regeneration of a people; and that when they are engrafted on the Sabbath, and made the substitute for its religious and proper services, they tend in the reverse direction. The gin-palace soon plants itself around these places of public entertainment and amusement, and finds in them a smooth and fascinating pathway to its snares; and few spectacles in our land are more riotous, more debased, more miserable, or more alarming as regards the future of our country, than a Sunday excursion-train, when it comes back and empties upon a city its pleasure-seekers and worshippers of nature. It is well known to masters, that such men, depressed by the reaction of riot and excitement, seldom return to their labours on Monday along with the tradesman who has turned his Sabbath to its proper and sacred uses. Nor is it difficult to foresee that if once the Sabbaths in Scotland and England were generally given to pleasure-seeking, they would ere long be bought up by commercial cupidity and enterprise, and the career of the working-man would resemble that of Samson, first sitting on the lap of pleasure, then bound and groaning in intellectual darkness and moral night, and ending his retributive course by drawing down upon himself and upon those who had enslaved him the pillars of our social edifice. "The mere animal," says the late Hugh Miller, "that has to pass six days of the week in hard labour, benefits greatly by a seventh day of mere animal rest and enjoyment: the repose, according to its nature, proves of signal use to it, just because _it is_ repose according to its nature. But man is not a mere animal: what is best for the ox and the ass is not best for him; and in order to degrade him into a poor unintellectual slave, over whom tyranny, in its caprice, may trample roughshod, it is but necessary to tie him down, animal-like, during his six working-days, to hard, engrossing labour, and to convert the seventh into a day of frivolous unthinking relaxation."

But we believe that the heart of Scotland generally is sound and enlightened on the Divine authority and the inestimable value of the Sabbath-day. To our minds it stands sacredly associated with the greatest events in human history, and in the intercourse of God with man--the completed handiwork of Almighty power, when God looked around Him upon the young and unfallen world, and pronounced all to be good--the giving of the Divine law from the sacred mount amid the signs of the present Deity--and the rising of our Redeemer from the grave, and the rising with Him of the hope of our world. We are a free and happy people, we have conquered the ruggedness of our soil, and coped successfully with our ungenial climate; but it is to our religion that we owe our freedom, for who can enslave a people that fear God? and we regard our Sabbath as the bulwark of our godliness. It is our Tabor, on which we ascend weekly and meet with celestial visitants; our Jacob's ladder on which we climb to heaven's gate; the shield and nutriment of our domestic affections, it keeps the heart of our households warm and pure. It is not to be abolished, but extended; and even when it passes away at the end of time, it will not go out in whirlwind or tempest, but

"As sets the morning-star, which goes Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides Obscured among the tempests of the sky, But melts away into the light of heaven."