rtitrts to t4e Calor.

THE SABBATH QIIESTIOB".

London, 3d July 1850.

Sin—Three or four centuries ago, it was the almost universal opinion within the realm of England, that the Pope had the power of deposing kings ; Scripture being of course represented as the authority.

If an individual, or even a considerable number of individuals, had stood up to oppose this doctrine on the ground that they did not like it; if they had stated that it interfered with their interests or their pleasures, that they hated fast-days, disliked celibacy, and found hair shirts and penance to be their utter aversion; it is plain that all they would have got by it would have been to be set down as irmligious opposers of the truth, and they would have been lucky if they had escaped the temporal fires which in those days were kept for the purification of creeds and practice.

But at last arose the men who went to the fountain-head and said, "We deny that the Scriptures establish the Pope's supremacy over kings at all. We aver on the contrary, that they establish the subordination of everybody to the civil and political authority. And we nail this thesis on the doors of the church, intending to abide by it in any event that shall befall."

A few of them were burnt en peasant; but everybody knows what finally was the result. Just so will it be in the present Sabbath controversy ; with due deductions for the difference of times. Men who believe the Apostle in preference to the Member for Bath, and the Reformers of the Church rather than the Secretaries to the Sunday Observance Societies, may have ill names given them, and perhaps be turned out of Parliament; but the result will be in the main the same.

The interests concerned in looking into the matter are beginning to be

serious. In a country where every peasant has the authority appealed to in his hands, there was danger in attempting to burke the fact, that the Apostle from whom we Gentiles derive our rules for faith and conversation, has fairly told us that Sabbath-keeping and not Sabbath-breaking is the malum prohibitum to Christians. That the observance of the Sabbath was directed to the followers of Moses in a certain text, is as plain as that circumcision and other observances are declared in half a dozen more to be "statutes for ever," and "everlasting covenants." How the theologians get over these

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"statutes for ever," it 114 not for us to say ; but the one thing we do know, is that we are not circumcised, and this through the direct command and interference of the same Apostle that has forbidden Sabbatical observances of all kinds.

The early Church obeyed the Apostolic injunction ; and it is not denied

that in the Apostolic times and writings there is no trace of anything like Sabbatieal observanoe, but the whole is as completely wiped from the scene 911 restrictions about meats were by Peter's vision of the sheet. The early Christians made a kind of festival of the first day of the week, in comme- moration of the Resurrection ; as is testified, among other things, by the re- grettable fact that they are found rebuked for some of those excesses to which festivities in all ages have been liable. The first appearance of the Sab- batical antichristianism, is stated by a well-informed and liberal Catholic writer in the provincial press, to have been about the year 1200, when an inmate of the monastery at Jerusalem announced that he had been com- manded in a vision to preach the observance of the first day of the week as the Sabbath, and a Norman Abbot conveyed the tidings across the Channel. To such strange sources do we owe the stoppage of our posts in the middle of the nineteenth century.

. The Protestant Reformers all stoutly resisted the imposition of Sunday as

the Sabbath. The Confession of Augsburg in 1530, drawn up by the princes Of Germany, and the act from which the name of Protestant was taken, enu- aerates the " observatio diei Donriniei, Pasehatis, .Penteeoetea, et aimilium lariat-um et rituum," among the " Hujuamodi disputationes quid aunt aura nisi higuel consetentiarum r (See Confession of Augsburg, in library of Brit. Mus.). Calvin is strong on the point, of all that was ceremonial about the Sabbath having been abolished by the coming of Christ. (Instil. Christiance Religionia, Geneva 1608. 2. 8. 31.). And Luther says, But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake ; if anywhere any one sets up its observance upon a Jewish foundation • then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it—tc: do anything that shall re- prove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty." (See Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge. U. 316.)

The Church of England, in its Catechism, ignores the fourth Jewish Com-

mandment. In its summary of duties derived from the Commandments, it refuses even to hint the existence of a duty upon this point. It will not so much as intimate to a parish apprentice that there is such a thing as Sob- bath. breaking or the contrary. It is true that in the Homilies a move is made upon the Sabbath ; but there is no limit to what may be found in a Church constituted as the Church of England was, if bye introductions of all kinds are to be considered as valid. The notorious fact is that the Church was a compromise, the work of many heads, each struggling to introduce some- thing of his own ; and consequently its doctrines are to be gathered from the place of most formal introduction, and not of the least. But nobody can doubt that the Catechism is a more formal introduction than a homily; the first being the responsible work of the whole, while the other was likely to be left to the zeal of individuals. And the consequence is, that by standing upon bye places of the Church's formulas, appearances may be found of transubstantiation, auricular confession, absolution, marriage if not a sacra- ment attempted to be attached to a sacrament, as exemplified by the refusal of a clergyman to many because the party had not been confirmed, and consequently could not be regularly admitted to the eucharist, and the cast- ing out of devils authorized by the 72d Canon (see Canons, in Brit. Mus.) on authority first had in writing from the bishop ; all instances, where the national creed goes along with the formal and well-advised declaration of doctrine, and not with the accidentaL

Add to this the authority of leading churchmen, Paley, Arnold, Whately,

Wilberforce, (not the bishop but his progenitor,). and the mass of evidence will be to prove, that the observance of one day in seven is nothing but a question of civil convenience and expediency, and in fact one of the cases where expediency. is allowed to over-ride the literal directions of Scrip- ture,—as in the instances of oath-taking, going to law, not turning the other cheek when smitten upon the first, nor consenting that he who would take our cloak should take our coat alto.

When the press, which has at last found itself involved in the general danger, will take up the question in this view, and make the scales fall from the eyes of the blind among society, the rest will be easily accomplished ; and it is most probable that, as in so many other instances, the end will be liberation from the tyranny of a grand untruth, and accumulated good to T.