30 MAY 1874, Page 15

CALVIN AND THE SABBATH.

[To THR EDITOR OP TRH " SPECTLTOR.1

your last impression the question is raised whether Mr. Peter Taylor was right in counting Calvin among anti-Sabbatarians. I would call your attention to the fact that the reformer included the moral obligation of the Sabbath among nugte pseudo-pro- phetarum ; or, as he says in his French version, mensonges des faux docteurs. The entire passage from Calvin's " Institutes " is translated in the appendix to Mr. Baden Powell's " Christianity -without Judaism." Macaulay, in his " History," says of the Puritans that, "in defiance of the express and reiterated declara- tions of Luther and Calvin, they turned the weekly festival by which the Church had from primitive times commemorated the resurrection of our Lord into the Jewish Sabbath."

Mr. Baden Powell says that " the notion of the complete identification of the Lord's Day with the Sabbath seems to have been first formally propounded in this country by Dr. Bound," a Puritan divine, in 1595, a most appalling fact for those who regard Sabbatarianism as a part of primitive Christianity.—I am, Sir, &c.,