If Christianity were to cease from among us, ii we were all to become atheists, it would not be less necessary than now, as M. Proudhon and many other men with as little religious conviction as Ire maintain, that nations should have their periodic intervals, and those not unfrequent, of public rest. So far as such intervals are essential to the physical and social welfare of the community, it certainly falls within the proper province of the civil power to appoint them. But then the nature of the ob servance which the magistrate has a right to de mand will necessarily depend On the objects for which alone he is empowered to appoint them ; that is, observance will involve only the intermis sion of the ordinary avocations of life. The reason which justifies the magistrate in demanding this much, in telling a man that he shall not drive his ordinary trade or busincss on such day, is obvious ; it is because, by the general consent, some such days are essential to the common weal, and he, as the organ of the community, is entrusted with the duty of securing that what is every man's right should be (which it otherwise could not) enjoyed by each member of the community. It is only thus that the dependent and labouring classes can be sure of that leisure which the law awards them ; that the fair dealer, paying respect to the claims of government, can be protected against one who, for the sake of gain, would employ in labour the hours which those who obey the law give to repose. So far the magistrate has clear right on his side. But he has no right (so the whole nation declares both by its theory and practice) to say how any one who does not violate the rights of others shall employ the leisure secured to him on such days ; in fasting or feasting ; in company or alone ; in wor ship or amusement In ex.acting the one sort of observance the law is but protecting the interests and legally-recognised rights of all classes in the com munity ; in attempting the other, it would be vio lating the rights of cOnscience. In enforcing the iormer, it is only exacting from each member of the community respect for the property of his neighbour—for the time thus given for relaxation is each man's property ; in exacting the latter, it would be dictating the way in which each shall use his own.* But as there has unquestionably grown up among many Christian churches and communities a notion of the obligation to spend the day in a more gloomy and ascetic fashion than either the O. T. sanctions in relation to the Sabbath or the N. in relation to the Lord's day, it is worth while to enquire how this occurred. It is principally due, we apprehend, to causes wbich ought to make those who inveigh against Puritan scruples and fanaticism,' as the chief causes, at least a little more moderate. For though there have been periods, no doubt, when religious men have been chargeable with excessive and absurd scrupulosity in relation to this matter, certainly the primary cause of their error—that which made it possible for them to wish to impose their scruples as a rule on the community—origi nated in the vexatious legislation which the state, when once made the patrbn of the church, thought it had a right to indulge in, It was not simply as religious men, but as men who had the notion that the state could rightfully intrude into this province, that they clamoured for minute and stringent legis lation on the subject ; and in so doing they only acted in accordance with the practice and traditions of centuries. The religious communities to which they belonged were cona'itioned by ancient prece dents, and therefore held exaggerated views of what falls within the civil province to enact and enforce. It is only necessary to read the decisions of the seveml ecclesiastical councils after the time of Constantine, to see how the influence of the civil power tended to render the law more minute and stringent ; it made the observance of the day more precise and universal in its obligation, de fined what scripture had left indefinite, and limited what it left free. And as it was the nataral tendency of the civil power to do this, as also to demand summary, complete, and universal obedience, so it enacted a number of penalties for disobedience of which scripture knows no thing, and which were entirely owing to the en largement of church authority conferred and en forced in virtue of its state alliance. And lastly, as the church, enlarging its claims with this alliance, sought precedents for its new pretensions in the O. T. (where the theocratical and civil elements
were redlly combined), it pressed to the utmost the analogies between the Jewish Sabbath and the Lord's day, in defence of its successive innovations. In its eagerness to find such precedents, it not only perverted the Lord's day, but, as we have seen, misinterpreted the Jewish Sabbath also, and sa.. in that a chamcter of gloom and austerity which never originally belonged to it. Hence, in the first instarice, the exaggerated and distorted notions of the day, the rigorous observance enjoined, and the multitude of minute and vexatious laws which civil legislatures, or ecclesiastical councils acting with and backed by them, have from time to time framed ; hence also, chiefly, not only morose and excessively rigid views of the kind of observance which the day demands, but traditional errors as to the power of the state to make such observance binding on the community at large.
The reader may see this in part illustrated in Dr. Hessey's Bainplon Lectures, where, though much more might be said to show how vexatious, minute, and tyrannical were the laws and regulations made by ecclesiastical authority, when it had the civil power at its beck, -enough is said to show that the Puritans, brought up in the same notions of the powers of church and state, found the task of pressing the supposed analogies from the Jewish Sabbath pretty well done to their hands.* Speak ing even of the Oh century, our author truly says : Insensibly, in part from dependence upon secular aid, and imitatiod of secular legislation (which must be universal in its terms and stringent in the en forcement of its commands) . . . rest, though em phatically a Christian rest, is beginning to be insisted on ; attendance at divine worship, hereto fore a service of love, is enforced by ecclesiastical pertalties' (p. IQ). A little further he says, as truly : In the centuries ranging from the 6th to the t5th, we find civil rulers, and councils, and ecclesiastical writers, by degrees altering tbeir tone' (p. 116), and he proceeds to give illustrations of this in a brief historic survey. It is not wonder ful that, partaking in the same erroneous notions of what church and state' conjointly might right fully attempt, and having such a long array of pre cedents to back them, the Puritans should have fallen into similar errors ; and as to the direction of those errors, it is fair to recollect (what Dr. Hessey candidly admits) the utterly unsatisfactory state of the observance of Sunday throughout the reign of Elizabeth (A.D. 1558-1603) nor must we forget that the methods by which it was sought to counter work the Puritans were errors of precisely the same kind, only in an opposite direction, and still more absurd than their own. To compel clergymen to read the ' Book of Sports' along with the church service was at least as absurd as to fine men for not going to church ; to attempt to make men play harlequin by acts of legislation, at least as absurd as to make them play the monk. The Book of Sports,' says Dr. Hessey, truly enough, was most faulty in principle. By its enumeration of things permitted, it gave occasion to the same casuistry as the enumeration of things forbidden on the other side. In fact, it flowed from the same perverted notions of what church and state could lawfully attempt, only in a yet more extravagant way.' While this may be said in extenuation of the errors of the Puritans, who imagined they were acting on precedents which ages had hallowed, it must be confessed that the °pillions of the leading Refortners—as Luther, Calvin, and Knox—were far less austere on this subject. In estimating the scriptural grounds for the due observance of the Lord's day, they deserve to be remembered aud duly weighed.
Lh'erature.—Buxtorf, Synagoga Yua'aica ; Grotii Annotationes ad Gen. et Exact'. ; Heylin, History of the Sabbath ; Michaelis, Laws of Moses, vol. iii. ch. iii. part 4th ; Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy, B. v. c. 7 ; Wardlaw's Discourses on the Sabbath ; Whately's Thoughts on the Sabbath ; Proudhon, De la Celebration du Dimanche; Three Letters on the Sunday Question, by N. NI. P. ; Hessey's Ba;Vton Lectures, 1860 ; Conder's Poli tical Law of the Sabbath ; Articles in Herzog's Real Encyclop. ; and Winer's .Real-Warterbuch ; Smith's Dictionaly of the Bible, arts. 'Lord's Day' and Sabbath ;' Kalisch, Hist. ana' Crit. Commentary (Exod. xx.)—H. R.