SABBATH OBSERVANCE

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1208, 4 September 1874, Page 3

SABBATH OBSERVANCE

[spectator.] The gloom of our English Sundays is no doubt clue to preventable causes, especially to the too frequently characteristic labor of Sunday—the labor, for instance, of going over and oyer again the lineaments of human depravity, of the attempt to persuade people on the one hand, and of the attempt of the listeners to believe on the other, that by some artificial sleight of hand called "accepting the conditions of salvation," those evil characteristics may be not so much extinguished, as formally cancelled in the account between man and God; to the Sisyphus labor of constantly exhorting to good works against the permanent undercurrent of conviction that nothing that is said will bear fruit among 1 per cent, of the hearers; to the Tantalus labor of presenting to thirsty sonls all the petty " means of grace" by which the ceremonial hope to get human nature into living contact with the divine—means of grace, however, which shrink away from their spirits as they approach. In all our English Churches and especially in those which are most Protestant, there is too much work and too little rest in the atmosphere of their thought. L'eligious teachers go over and over, again and again, the considerations which should startle and depress or spur the soul, but too seldom—we except the beautiful liturgy, and especially beautiful Communion Service of the Kational Church—dwell on those which should confirm its strength and calm its troubles. No more horribly laborious conception than that of the Puritan Sabbath was probably ever invented, —a day on which, if you moved your little finger from any but a sanctified motive, you ought to have taken yourself to task for a grievous sin. . There is a feeling still among Sabbatarians that all other sin—nay. the worst of other sins, in their eyes, heresy itself—is infinitely less culpable than what they are pleased to call Sabbathbreaking- and no conception could render more completely impossible the peace of a day of rest than this notion, that of all duties Sabbath-keeping is the most easy to be unfaithful to—the most difficult as well as obligatory to discharge well. To be at peace while you are struggling in the meshes of a whole host of untangible, fanciful obligations, the least disloyalty to which is a grave sin, is about as impossible as for the body to be at rest while gnats and mosquitoes are singing their warsong around it. Certainly, if it were possible to make a day of rest a day of the most elaborate moral fatigue of which the heart is capable, the Puritan Sabbath effects it. But even those of our religious teachers who do not in the least believe in this elaborate device for knocking up the heart and soul of man, certainly do think too little of the spiritual rest which the Sunday ought to bring with its physical rest. Without losing the opportunity of awakening and stimulating dozing consciences, they might purely do much more than they actually do to help us to realise the refreshment and the new life which the revelation of a divine love, as the source of all the order of the universe, should, bestow.