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AMONG the social problems of

the day which furnish matter for much anxious thought and some perplexity to those who have the welfare of their fellows at heart, not the least important is that which has for its subject the proper observance of Sunday. The question is not a new one: it is one on which there has been diversity of opinion as well as of practice almost from the foundation of Christianity. During the last hundred and fifty years it gave rise to little discussion; but it has of late been once more brought prominently forward. On the one hand, attempts at restrictive legislation; on the other, endeavours to assimilate in some measure the English Sunday to that of the Continent by opening places of public amusement; in a word, the conflicting efforts of one party to draw tighter, of the other to relax, existing restraints, have invested the subject with fresh interest. We beg our readers will not be alarmed. We have not the smallest intention of entering into any theological discussion of this question: we merely propose to give a brief sketch of its history since the Reformation, to offer a few remarks on its present position, and to indicate the line which it seems to us most desirable to follow. In doing this, we shall avail ourselves freely of the facts accumulated by Dr. Hessey in his able and interesting work on the origin, history, and obligation of Sunday.* A word or two as to the state of the question prior to the Reformation may not be out of place.

It is material to observe that for the first three centuries Sunday, or the Lord's-day, was never confounded with the Jewish Sabbath; they were regarded as entirely distinct in their origin, and as resting on totally different grounds.

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the judgment of the early Church, the Sabbath was abrogated with the rest of the law of which it formed a part: the institution of the Christian Festival had entirely superseded it. It was not simply, as it was afterwards represented, a transfer from one day of the week to the other; it was a new ordinance taking the place of one which had passed away. And the mode of observance was as different as were the grounds on which it was based. Of the precise extent of that observance we have no means of judging; probably it was not very accurately defined. It seems certain, however, that cessation from all labour was not imperative; nor was there anything at all like that enforced strictness which was seen in after-ages. Sabbatarianism

that is, confusion of the Sabbath with the Lord's-day-is of much later growth. The names, as well as the days, were kept perfectly distinct; so much so, that some Christian sects observed both: a practice, however, which was speedily condemned. Saturday was still the Sabbath; and to have applied that name to Sunday would have been perfectly unintelligible, as, indeed, it would be in Spain or Italy to this day.

The first attempt to prescribe definite rules for the observance of Sunday is to be found, we believe, in the well-known edict of Constantine, A.D. 321. In this document rest from all secular occupations on Sunday (for so the day is called) is enjoined on all persons residing in cities; but in the country those engaged in agriculture are allowed freely to continue their occupation, lest it should happen that another day not being equally favourable for planting or sowing, the opportunity offered by Divine Providence should be lost. We have not space to discuss the various motives which

have been assigned for the publication of this decree; they were probably of a mixed character; but we quite agree with Dr. Hessey, that the enactment was not Sabbatarian, or an advance towards Sabbatarianism; nor was it, on the other hand, a formal permission of labour to Christians which was not enjoyed before,' though Hooker appears to have regarded it in this light. On the contrary, it was, as it seems to us, a restriction, so far as it went; an interference on the part of the State, now become Christian, in favour of its Christian subjects, the great majority of whom, as is well known, were inhabitants of the large towns and cities. By making the Christian Festival a day of rest for the whole Empire, and especially by compelling the cessation of judicial and all other public business on that day, it left them free to follow the dictates of their own consciences without detriment to their worldly interests, and removed all hindrances to the due celebration of the Divine offices. But there is no reference whatever to the Sabbath, nor anything in the least approaching to Sabbatarian strictness. So things continued for about the next two hundred years. We hear of nothing at all 'like the confusion between the seventh day and one day in seven, of which we have heard so much in England since 1595. There is no hint of the transfer of the Sabbath to the Lord's-day, or of the planting of the Lord's-day on the ruins of the Sabbath, those fictions of modern times. If the Sabbath appears, it appears as a perfectly distinct day. And what is still more to our purpose, looking at the matter as a practical one, though law proceedings are forbidden, and labour for gain (at any rate in towns), and amusements unseemly for a Christian on any day are forbidden, no symptom is as yet discoverable of compulsory restrictions of, or con

scientious abstinence from, such recreations and necessary duties (other than trades and professions) as are permissible on other days, so long as they do not interfere with Divine worship, and the things. connected with it, and appropriate to the Lord's-day.' In short, the Sunday of the fourth and fifth centuries corresponded very much with the ideal of the English Sunday of our own day.

But a change was at hand. The authority of the Church began to be substituted for that of the Scriptures. Festivals and holy-days were multiplied: gradually the Lord'sday was placed on the same level as the rest; its obligation was based on a new ground; it became, in short, to be regarded as, strictly speaking, no longer a Divine, but an ecclesiastical ordinance. At the same time, the Church, not content to rest upon her presumed infallibility, or finding perhaps that her decrees were in some danger of being disregarded, thought it necessary to have recourse to a higher authority. She turned for a sanction, like the Puritans in aftertimes, to the Old Testament. The Jewish festivals were discovered to be the type of the Christian, the Jewish Sabbath of the Lord's-day. The next step was an easy one. The restrictions of the Fourth Commandment were adopted and refined upon kings, councils, and bishops vied with each other and emulated the later Jewish teachers, nay, almost surpassed them, in devising minute and vexatious regulations, regulations equalling in rigour and absurdity those adopted by the Puritans, or by the Scotch of our own day. The period of enforced rest was extended from the afternoon of Saturday to the dawn of Monday. Music was interdicted, travelling was prohibited; to wash a dish or cook a dinner was a mortal sin. Archbishop Chichele, the founder of All Souls College, in the fifteenth century, in

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language worthy of Exeter Hall or of some of our modern liturgical reformers, forbids all barbers and other persons to follow their callings on the morning of 'the Lord's-day, viz., the seventh day, which the Lord blessed and sanctified, and on which, after the works of the six days, He rested from His work!' It is curious and very instructive to note this identity of principle and action in the two extremes of ecclesiastical tyranny; this absolute yet puerile supervision over men's consciences claimed and exercised by Pope and Presbytery. It is remarkable, too, that both seek their sanction in the Old Testament, and agree in exalting the Jewish law of ceremonies above the law of liberty proclaimed by the Gospel. But we shall have more to say on this point presently. Of course, there were wiser men who protested against these superstitious follies. Gregory I. went the length of denouncing such opinions as the invention of Antichrist; and other popes and bishops, while insisting strongly on the sanctity of the Lord's-day, lifted up their voices against any Judaic observance of it. But we must not linger over this period. This excessive strictness led, by a not unnatural revulsion, to the opposite extreme. The repulsive force operated in two ways, but in the same direction. Some religious sects, as the Lollards and Waldenses, were goaded into the contrary error of denying all distinctions of days, justifying their tenets by a misinterpretation of some expressions of St. Paul; while the mass of the people, finding it impossible to observe with the prescribed punctuality the numerous festivals and holy-days which had been elevated to a coordinate dignity with the Lord's-day, and made to rest upon the same authority, learnt after a while to disregard them all equally; or rather, perhaps, as is still the case in most parts of the Continent, to regard Sunday as of less importance and of inferior sanctity to many of the others. It had become a day of which one part was devoted without scruple to the pur

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suit of men's ordinary avocations, while the remainder was abandoned to mere holiday-making, not unfrequently to licentiousness and excess of every kind. At this point the Reformation found the question. The Lord's-day was obscured by a sort of Sabbatarianism established on an ecclesiastical foundation.' This was its theoretical position, its place in the ecclesiastical system; in the practice of the people it had become almost wholly desecrated. The Continental Reformers, in their antagonism to everything savouring of Popery, did not content themselves with sweeping away at once the array of holy-days which had grown up under the shadow of the Church of Rome, and with denying the Jewish or Sabbatical character of the Lord's-day; they ran into the opposite extreme of refusing to it any claim to a Divine origin; they placed it among the ordinances which, being matters of indifference, any particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, or abolish' some of them even went the length of declaring it to be a mere civil institution, binding, if binding at all, only by the will of the secular power. Calvin, indeed, deliberated for some time whether, as an effectual protest against superstition, the day of rest should not be changed to Thursday, though after some hesitation he decided on retaining Sunday, on the ground of expediency. would be foreign to our purpose to enter into any discussion as to the other reasons, based upon their peculiar theological views, which may have conspired with the hatred and dread of Rome in inducing the foreign Reformers to adopt these low views respecting the Lord'sday. It is sufficient to observe that such sanctions as they were able to devise being utterly powerless to bind men's consciences, the result was, as might have been anticipated, precisely identical with that of the overstraining, or rather perhaps the misapplication, of the opposite theory by the Church of Rome; namely, the almost total neglect of the day as one of reli

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gious observance. The Protestant countries of Europe, reformed and unreformed, are very nearly alike in this matter. With the general aspect of Sunday in France and Italy, Spain and Portugal, many of our readers are of course familiar. Many, too, will doubtless be able to bear witness to the fidelity of the following description of a Sunday in Protestant Geneva, quoted by Dr. Hessey from Laing's Notes of a Traveller. After contrasting the general aspect of the place with that of a Scotch town on a 'Sabbath' morning, on which he dwells with an affection with which perhaps we do not quite sympathize, and describing the meagre character of the single service in the day in the cathedral, the head church of the original seat of Calvinism, attended by 'about two hundred females and three-and-twenty males out of a population of five- and twenty thousand souls,' and ending with a waltz to go out with,' he draws this edifying picture for the benefit of his Scottish readers :

A pleasure tour in the steamboatswhich are regularly advertised for a Sunday promenade round the lake-a picnic dinner in the country, and overflowing congregations in the evening at the theatre, the equestrian circus, the concert-saloons, ball-rooms, and coffeehouses, are all that distinguished Sunday from Monday. In the villages along the Protestant side of the Lake of Geneva the rattling of the billiard-balls, the rumbling of the skittle-trough, the shout, the laugh, the distant shots of the rifle-gun clubs, are heard above the psalm, the sermon, and the barren forms of State-prescribed prayer, during the one brief service on Sundays delivered to very scanty congregations-in fact, to a few females and a dozen or two old men-in very populous parishes, supplied with able and zealous ministers.

One can imagine a Scotchman's horror at such scenes in the city where Knox sat at the feet of Calvin, and which was indeed blessed by the occasional ministry of the Scottish apostle himself; though Knox's own views with respect to the Sabbath' were by no means those which are com

monly associated with his name. We cannot, however, but agree with Mr. Laing that this state of things contrasts unfavourably even with the laxity of the Roman Catholic Sunday: 'Rome,' as he says, 'has still superstition; Geneva has not even that semblance of religion.' How much of inward rottenness is covered by the outward sanctity of a Scottish Sunday is a question which we waive for the present.

In England, things took from the first a different course. Our Reformers were far slower to break away from established notions; it was long before they surrendered either the ecclesiastical or the Sab

batarian view of Sunday; if indeed they can be said ever to have wholly emancipated themselves from either. On the one side, they seem to have clung more to the sanction of the Old Testament; on the other, to have been much restrained by the personal feelings of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, who were both well disposed to support authority, and were not unwilling to transfer to themselves, as far as it was practicable, that which had hitherto been exercised in matters pertaining to ecclesiastical discipline by the Pope. Thus, in one of Elizabeth's injunctions, Sunday is still classed with the other holidays, though it must be confessed that Sabbatarian scruples are little respected; for it is declared that ‘if for any scrupulosity or grudge of conscience some should superstitiously abstain from working on those days, they shall grieviously offend.' They were perfectly at liberty, as far as appears, to abstain from working if they thought fit, for any other reason except for conscientious scruples; and if we may judge from the language of the Homily, published about 1562, they availed themselves to the utmost of the licence thus granted: 'God was more dishonoured, and the devil better served, on the Sunday than upon all the days of the week beside.' The desecration seems to have been quite as great and not less general than it had ever been before the Refor mation. Whether it was that little

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pains were taken to enforce the religious observance of the day, or whether the habits of the people were too deeply rooted to be easily shaken, it is difficult to determine. After a while, however, there was a reaction; the Puritan doctrines began to find favour; before the end of the century a great change had come over men's minds; a code of prohibitions and regulations for the proper observance of the Sabbath (for 'Sunday' was almost discarded as a heathenish appellation) was published, not unlike those which had been devised some centuries before, and was very generally accepted. These rules did not emanate from authority, though they were not without countenance from some in high stations. The movement may be said to have originated among the people themselves. At its commencement, doubtless, it met a great and glaring evil, so great and so glaring as to account for the rapidity with which the effort to subdue it gained popularity; and the restrictions which the Puritan divines aimed at enforcing, though sometimes needlessly minute, and based, as we think, on a wrong principle, were many of them desirable for the sake of a public recognition of the sanctity of the day, and the rest, for the most part, sufficiently inoffensive. But it did not long rest here; the zeal of followers soon outran, as commonly happens, the intentions of their leaders, and if the accounts which have come down to us are to be trusted, the most monstrous doctrines were propounded as legitimate deductions from the divine ordinance as accommodated to the necessities of the Christian Church. 'It was preached in Oxfordshire,' says Strype, 'that to do any work on the Sabbath was as great a sin as to kill or to commit adultery. It was preached in Somersetshire, that to throw a bowl on the Sabbath day was as great a sin as to commit murder. It was preached in Norfolk, that to make a feast or a wedding dinner on that day, was as great a sin as for a father to take a knife and cut his son's throat.

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It was preached in Suffolk, that to ring more bells than one on the Lord's-day to call the people to church, was as great a sin as to do an act of murder.' These extravagances were after all perhaps no more than the natural result of the previous excessive laxity; as soon as men's eyes were thoroughly opened to the one fault, they rushed, as is almost invariably the case under the influence of religious excitement, with a headlong impulse into the other. The natural product of the coldness and formalism of the last century, was the fanaticism of the Methodists; we must venture to express our belief that the 'revivals' of our own day owe their origin to a cause not wholly dissimilar. We have learnt to deal more wisely with such outbreaks than was the wont of our forefathers. We have ceased to invoke the arm of the law to effect that which is far better effected by very different weapons; such attempts, at any rate, have become comparatively rare, and have not of late been attended with a very encouraging measure of success. We do not ourselves anticipate any very serious consequences to the writers of Essays and Reviews, either from the 'Synodical action of Convocation, set in motion by one who does not seem to have learnt a lesson of toleration from the unjust persecution from which he has himself so recently, and with such difficulty, escaped, or from the ill-judged attempt of the Bishop of Salisbury to bring the most offensive of those writers within the grasp of the law. In the sixteenth century, however, those more enlightened principles of polemics which have not even yet found universal acceptance, were wholly unknown; and we cannot be surprised to find that various efforts were made to put down these monstrous doctrines with the strong hand. To have left them to time and common sense was a course that would never have occurred to a statesman, far less to an ecclesiastic of those days. The most harmless, yet at the same time one of the least