Chapter III: Part 3

It is said, “The rich break the Sabbath, and that many professing Christians pay little attention to its sacred dictates”; _ergo_, the poor man must be robbed of his day of rest! This, my Lord, is the logic of your friends, as though doubling or trebling a crime could consecrate it. Every Sabbath breaker, whether monarch, lord, priest, or pretended saint, is really and truly a Sabbath breaker, and therefore is no Christian; and as a thousand thefts or murders cannot sanctify one, so thousands or millions of acts of Sabbath desecration cannot alter God’s law or man’s physical constitution. There stands the law engraved on man’s muscles, nerves, and brain; and written also by the same Divine Physiologist and Lawgiver in the sacred volume: “Remember the day of rest”—“in it thou shalt do no manner of work,” &c., are the words; and woe be to him who dares break this “commandment, or teach men to do so.”

I was surprised to read in several newspapers the reasons which you, my Lord, assigned for granting a charter for this Sabbath cruelty. You stated that you wished to open the Palace for “the HEALTH, COMFORT, and MORALS of the people.” I confess that I hardly believed my own eyes, and I perused several reports of your speech before I gave them credit. But let us examine them a little.

I. Sabbath desecration for “_the health of the people_”: that is, you propose to shorten the lives of one class of men, for the supposed health of others! This is not very humane. And then, Sabbath desecration injures rather than promotes health. This was shown long since in the Parliamentary evidence on the observance of the Sabbath. Masters who employ large bodies of men, know full well how to distinguish the workman who spends his Sabbath in a moral and religious manner, from those who pass it in tea gardens, travelling, and dissipation. The latter are said to be frequently “not worth their salt” on a Monday; while the former are healthy, strong, and vigorous for labour, showing that the Sabbath has had its intended refreshing, re-creating, and quickening influence on their bodies, minds, and morals. There is plenty of Sabbath amusement in Paris and on the Continent; but then many of these poor creatures are half dead on the morrow, and require a Saint Monday to restore them. The bills of mortality also of London, for many years past, without a Crystal Palace, will bear comparison with any of the great cities abroad. And if, my Lord, you will obtain correct statistics of the health and longevity in the metropolis or the country of those who break and of those who rigidly observe the Sabbath, you will never say another word about Sabbath desecration as necessary to health. I am quite willing to stake the whole question on the health of the Sabbath School teachers of London. With all due deference, you must allow us to believe that the Great Physiologist who made man’s body and breathed into it an immortal soul, was not inattentive to our health and life, when he gave the Fourth Commandment; and certainly viewed the human family with as much tenderness as the Earl of Derby.

II. Sabbath desecration for “_the comfort of the people_.” Of course, my Lord, you intended to omit the comfort of the men and their wives and families who are to be employed in the Sydenham speculation. These poor creatures will have little comfort on the Sabbath. The father will be at work and the family will be at home bereft of its best friend. And then as to the others, who are to be amused and comforted, I am prepared to show that the families of those who keep the Sabbath are ten thousand times more comfortable than of those who break it. Let the homes of the working men in England who observe the Lord’s-day, be examined in connection with the homes of labourers and artisans on the continent, and we do not fear what will be the result of such an investigation even in this single matter of comfort. Yes, and let Spitalfields be scrutinized, and a fair report be given of the condition of those who keep, and of those who break the Sabbath, and, my Lord, the comparison will most triumphantly prove that there can be a far higher degree of comfort enjoyed from religion than any Crystal Palace can yield. There are hundreds of happy families in Spitalfields and elsewhere, who are happy because they are pious and keep the Lord’s-day holy. To them the Sabbath is a foretaste and earnest of heaven. When the morning of the day of rest dawns, they hail it with the words of Newton,

“How welcome to the saint, when pressed
With six days’ care and pain and toil,
Is the reviving day of rest,
Which hides him from the world awhile!”

Or else they sing, with Watts,

“Welcome, sweet day of rest,
That saw the Lord arise,
Welcome to this reviving breast
And these rejoicing eyes”!!!

Among these poor people you will find some of the happiest persons upon the face of the globe, and in their homes ten times more comfort than is enjoyed by their Sabbath breaking neighbours who have better wages. Keeping the Sabbath aright invariably leads to domestic comfort and happiness; while breaking it, as certainly produces misery; and therefore, my Lord, it was bad domestic, bad political economy; bad physiology, bad morality and divinity to talk of increasing the comforts of the people by Sabbath dissipation. All history, all statistics, all observation, all nations, all Scripture are against your proposition.

III. Sabbath desecration for “_The Morality of the People_!!” This, my Lord, is certainly the climax of all. We used to be sent to the “Newgate Calendar,” and were told that Sabbath breaking led to all sorts of vice, but now the tables are turned, and working on the Sabbath and the neglect of divine worship and religious instruction are to bring the Millennium! You have been, my Lord, in France and especially in Paris on the Sabbath. There they have all sorts of pleasure gardens, costly trees and shrubs, museums, picture galleries, crystal fountains, &c., &c., open to all the public without a fee on the Sabbath. The Palais Royal; the Palace of Vendôme; the Palace of the Tuileries, and its gardens; and the Champs Elysées, with its splendid walks, will perhaps bear comparison with anything we shall have at Sydenham; and I certainly never expect to see any exhibition in this country that will vie with the palaces, waterworks, and illuminations at Versailles and St. Cloud. These, my Lord, have been for years thrown open to the people. France from time immemorial has been renowned for its popular amusements and Sunday sights and recreations, and yet these did not save the nation from “_Sans Culottism_,” “The Reign of Terror,” and all sorts of mad revolutions. With all these grand sights and the morality of Sabbath breaking, the French and the Continentals cannot be trusted with scarcely a particle of liberty, but must be kept in order with the bayonet; while your own immoral countrymen, who are in danger of becoming savages without a Crystal Palace, know so well how to take care of themselves that you trusted the Crystal Palace in their hands without a single soldier to protect it. With these facts before us, it sounds rather strange to hear your Lordship talk of improving the morality of the people by Sabbath desecration, when it is as clear as any fact of the present time that we owe our morality, our national contentment, security, progress, and preeminence, to our observance of the Lord’s-day. Do away with the Sabbath, my Lord, and Sans Culottism may yet reign in England, even though the Sydenham Palace may very far surpass Versailles and St. Cloud.

But if Crystal Palaces have such virtue that a visit once or twice a year to its gardens will make the vilest of the people moral, I am thinking, my Lord, that some will begin to imagine that we may soon dispense with archbishops, bishops, deans, and all the other expensive apparatus of a State Establishment. We may be sure that not one in ten of those who go to Sydenham will think of going to church before they start on the railway. Indeed, many argue that the Palace is to be opened to moralize and spiritualize those who will not at the present time enter our churches or chapels. And this said Sydenham is to perform such marvels in virtue and piety as Joanna Southcott and Mormonites never ventured even in their wildest flights to anticipate. And if so, why not plant gardens, construct fountains, and erect Crystal Palaces generally? Many of the clergy and dissenting ministers we are told have miserable congregations at present: why not make them porters and waiters at Sydenham, seeing railway men, it is supposed, will produce more morality in a few hours than some of your clergy and dissenting ministers can call forth in many years? And if the plan will work so well in the afternoon, why not have it in the morning? and then there will be no need of mocking the Almighty by praying for grace to keep the Fourth Commandment at the moment that we intend to trample it under our feet. Depend upon it, my Lord, there are not a few who will conclude that under such a moral and religious dispensation as that which the Crystal Palace adventurers have proposed to bring in, the property of the Church may go to pay off the national debt.

I may have seemed to treat this matter with levity, but was it possible to discuss such arguments with seriousness? to talk of gardens, &c., producing morality, when history shows us what architecture, pleasure grounds, and such like inventions did for Egypt, Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, and other countries, who with all these incentives to piety became the victims of their own vices? But I will not enlarge except to say that you cannot, my Lord, follow a better guide than the Bible, nor confer a greater boon on the nation than to preserve its Sabbaths from being violated by labour. I have now been nearly thirty years at Ebley, and during that time have preached to a large congregation, most of them poor people, and have had ample opportunity of seeing the effects of Sabbath breaking and Sabbath observance. I am told that our chapel and schools, as seen from the Great Western Railway, look like a little paradise, and I could show your Lordship as many happy homes as perhaps any minister in any agricultural and manufacturing district in the country. I wish your Lordship would send a commissioner to look at us, for we could then prove by visible facts, that “health,” “comfort,” “morality,” intelligence and pure religion flow, and flow alone, from strict obedience to the Fourth Commandment. I had intended to say more to prove that the keeping of the seventh day is as obligatory now as in the days of Moses, but I will reserve those arguments for a separate essay, and in the meantime remain, my Lord,

Your Lordship’s obedient Servant,

B. PARSONS.

EBLEY, STROUD, GLOUCESTERSHIRE,
_March_ 10_th_, 1853.

P.S.—I ought, my Lord, to have added above that some persons, from this expected rage of the poor people to go to the Crystal Palace on Sundays, and its moralizing influence, will draw an argument in favour of the Voluntary Principle in religion which your Lordship has so long condemned. For if these children of destitution will pay such large sums to be educated and moralized at Sydenham, what need of State Education, tithes, or religious endowments? I should not be surprised to hear it proposed to have St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey turned into Crystal Palaces. In making these remarks I am only reasoning on the premises laid down by your Lordship, that the people would be rendered “_moral_” by going to the Crystal Palace on Sundays. Bishops, priests, deacons, and dissenting ministers, it is presumed, have failed; and now dram shops are to be emptied, and Spitalfields, St. Giles, and Rosemary Lane regenerated by the Sydenham grounds! Certainly, my Lord, before this new experiment is tried, it would be well to inquire, whether the Bible, Christianity, and Religious Instruction are a failure? whether Sabbath breaking will be more moralizing than Sabbath observance? whether the poor people in London will have money enough to go in shoals to Sydenham? and whether those who will really go will not be the persons who have ample time and means to go on the week?

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London: Printed for John Snow, 35, Paternoster Row.