My Lord,

Divided as the country is in its political and religious sentiments, there is one subject on which there is a very great unanimity: and I may add also that this union of opinion exists among the most moral of your countrymen; the most loyal supporters of the throne and the constitution; the most enlightened members of the community; and the most benevolent and philanthropic individuals in the empire.  I need not say that the point on which all these persons are agreed is “The observance of Sabbath.”  Here, my Lord, you have thousands or rather millions of citizens who never trouble the realm in any way by their vices or disorderly conduct; who are never brought before magistrates or judges for their offences; and who require no soldiers or police to watch over them and keep them from disturbing the commonwealth.

It is a matter of surprise to all sober and reflecting minds that you, my Lord, should wish to set yourself in an attitude of antagonism towards all these peaceful and religious men and women; and especially that you should do this most gratuitously and in defiance of your own creed.

I.  In wishing to grant a charter for the violation of the Lord’s-day, you, my Lord, tried to play the same game as your predecessors.  The profit of a small company of railway kings was the chief thing sought; and to obtain their smile, you were willing to risk the favour of the King of Kings, to endanger the morals of the country, and consequently the Throne, the Constitution, and the Church; and you were also setting yourself in an attitude of defiance against the best and most patriotic of your countrymen.  There might, my Lord, have been boldness in this effort of yours to undermine the Sabbath and trample upon the consciences of the majority of the nation, but the infatuation was equal to the courage.  You have long been ambitious of power.  The deep and settled opinion in your own mind for a long time has been, that both as a profoundly wise and apostolically religious man, you, my Lord, and you alone, were the only person in the realm qualified to guide the affairs of this great empire.  Your Lordship has for some years put yourself forward as the bulwark of the Church and of pure Christianity.  All persons who differed from you have been viewed as heretics and sinners exceedingly; and you are, according to your own showing, a model saint, the moral hero and spiritual Wellington of religion and the Bible; and yet, after all these high pretensions, no sooner were you in power than your first effort on behalf of Christianity was to announce to the country that you were about to set the authority of your royal mistress against the command of the King of Heaven; and, in doing so, you alienated from yourself and your administration the minds of the majority of the religious people whom you promised to serve if you could only obtain the reins of government.

But supposing you had possessed such power that you could have said, “I fear not God,” yet sound policy might have suggested that it would be well to have some “regard to man.”  You really were not quite secure in your post as prime minister.  A few votes of the senate deprived you in an instant of all your authority; and you fell because you rendered yourself unpopular in the estimation of the nation.  You ought also to know that religion is a sacred thing in the eyes of all, whether Pagans, Jews, Mahommedans, or Christians.  To touch the ark has brought destruction upon many an “Uzzah” without any special intervention of heaven; and you, my Lord, are not too high for their doom.  The majority which sustained you in office was very small and doubtful; and nothing sunk you so low in the estimation of thousands as this Sabbath desecration, which you proposed to establish by a royal charter!!  By many you were looked upon as the bulwark of the Church and religion; and by your own speeches you wished to make the country believe that you were a very godly man; and yet without the least substantial reason you blasted all their hopes, and, in their estimation, you have denied the faith, and become worse than an infidel—because an unbeliever has no reverence, and can have no reverence for the Word of God; but you profess to believe in its divine origin, and to be guided by its sacred injunctions, and thus sinned with your eyes open: you have therefore foolishly, most gratuitously, alienated your friends, and hastened your own downfal, and all to please the avarice and fill the coffers of a small clique of gentlemen who prefer “gain to godliness.”

II.  You have not only been guilty of the most gratuitous presumption and rashness, but you have also acted in defiance of your own creed.  You, my Lord, according to your own showing, are a very religious, indeed, an apostolically religious, man—a believer in the Church Catechism, and in the doctrine of confirmation.  Doubtless your Lordship has been confirmed; and I may presume that you go to church as often as the majority of your order; and, when there, you listen very attentively to the reading of the decalogue, and after each precept you most devoutly and sincerely repeat the prayer, “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law!”  At the end of the tenth command you vary the words, and say, “Lord have mercy upon us, AND WRITE ALL THESE THY LAWS IN OUR HEARTS, WE BESEECH THEE.”

My Lord, would you be satisfied that your commands to your servants should be half broken and half kept?  Are you pleased with your coachman if he drives you half way to church on the Sabbath when your command is to be driven all the way?  Do you like to have your will in any other particular but half done?  Would you be pleased to have your hunters and racehorses but half fed and half groomed, or your food but half cooked?  Yet we may ask, Who is the Earl of Derby, that his commands should be perfectly obeyed to the very letter, while the God of Heaven, at the instance of this same Earl of Derby, is to be satisfied with only a moiety of that obedience which he has enjoined in the Scripture?

But perhaps you may say, “that you neither disobey it, nor teach others to do so.”  I need not tell your Lordship, as a learned man, and the Chancellor of one of the great seats of learning, that the day mentioned by Moses, and which you pray the Almighty to give you grace to observe, is TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LONG; that during these twenty-four hours we are commanded to abstain from all manner of work; that we are “to keep the day holy to Jehovah,” and consequently to observe it religiously by not “doing our own ways, finding our own pleasure, or speaking our own words.”  Such is the command of the King of Kings.  How then can the half observance of the Lord’s-day be reconciled with the divine command to keep the whole?  If the railway to Sydenham is to be worked on the Sabbath, and the pleasure grounds thrown open, you will of necessity doom a large number of clerks, stokers, drivers, porters, waiters and others to labour on that day on which Jehovah has commanded that no work shall be done.  The God of Heaven says, “Thou shalt do no manner of work”; but the Earl of Derby tells the people that they may work on the Sabbath!  You thus set yourself in a position of antagonism against the Creator of the Universe.  The Scriptures assert that “The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath”; but you, my Lord, intimate that the Earl of Derby is the Lord of the Sabbath!!  When “God spake,” he solemnly commanded that the whole day should be observed; but when the Earl of Derby spoke, he said “Let half the day be kept,” thus making himself not only equal but superior to the Almighty!

You have, my Lord, by your changing, often surprised your countrymen; but this wish to trample the Prayer Book in the dust, to set Baptism, Catechism, Confirmation, the Communion Service, and the Word of God at defiance, is a revolution which none of your friends or foes were prepared to expect, and should you succeed will be attended with greater evils to the masses and greater calamities to the nation than have ever yet occurred.  England owes all to her Bible and her Sabbaths; and I may add, that the Scriptures would have been of little good without her Sabbaths.  Abolish, my Lord, the rest of the seventh day, and you may write “Ichabod” on our walls.  The Bible has been but partially studied by those nations who reject the Lord’s-day, and their history and present condition show that they have paid very dearly for this neglect.

The change in The Prayer Book too must be greater than at first was contemplated.  Instead of praying “Lord have mercy upon us, and write ALL these THY commandments in our hearts, we beseech thee”; or, when the fourth is abolished, “Lord have mercy upon us, and write NINE of these THY commandments in our hearts, we beseech thee,” you will have to obliterate them from the Liturgy altogether.  And indeed wherever in the prayers, thanksgivings, or collects there is any reference to the commandments of Jehovah, the words must be omitted in the re-formed Prayer Book.  Of course, my Lord, after this great and stupendous change, we shall hear no more of the heresy of Nonconformists, and the wonder of modern times will be, not, “Is Saul among the prophets?” but, “Is the Earl of Derby among dissenters?”

Other Prayer Book reforms, my Lord, will have to follow.  To preserve your consistency it will be needful to omit the Lord’s Prayer.  Five times in the full morning service of your Church the petition is offered, “Lead us not into temptation,” and yet when your devotions are ended you wish to proclaim by royal charter that the people shall be tempted to break the Sabbath.  I need not tell your Lordship as a learned divine, that “temptation,” in the prayer alluded to, means, temptation “to sin,” and that “to sin” is to violate the commandments of Jehovah.  When therefore you pray not to be led “into temptation,” you intimate that your nature is weak, and entreat our heavenly Father to prevent your being placed in any position in which your pious principles would be likely to give way.  How strange then that you, who are so sensitive of your own frailty, notwithstanding the robustness of your piety, should propose to have the young, the morally feeble and undecided, tempted every seventh day to trample the commandment of heaven in the dust!  Surely, my Lord, if it is of so much importance that yourself and all the railway directors and pious newspaper editors who go to church, should be kept from temptation, that you pray five times in the morning service for divine protection, then it is also necessary that the poor vulgar herd of sinners, who have so little of your apostolical godliness, should also be preserved from temptation.  It seems inexplicably marvellous that you should exhibit so much care of your own piety and morality, and yet be so reckless about the virtue of your poorer neighbours as actually to propose that other persons, by royal charter, should be led into that very temptation to sin from which you five times on the Sabbath morning entreat the Almighty to enable you to escape.  Either, my Lord, invite the Convocation to obliterate the Lord’s Prayer as well as the ten commandments from the Liturgy, or else cease to instigate the nation to rebel against the Word of God.  In fact, if you continue to advocate Sabbath breaking, you ought to leave the Church and reject the Liturgy, or to have the words “command” and “commandments” expunged from every prayer and collect in the Prayer Book.

I cannot imagine that after proposing this charter for Sabbath breaking, you will ever repeat the words, “God be merciful unto us and bless us, and show us the light of his countenance and be merciful unto us.  That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.”  God’s “way” is his commandments, and there is no “saving health” except in obeying them.  But to give a royal charter to set at nought the Fourth or any other Command, is to do what you can to prevent God’s “way” from being “known upon the earth,” and therefore of course you will have this Psalm expunged from evening service, or else never unite in repeating or chanting it.  Your conduct, my Lord, for the sake of consistency, must demand the most sweeping alterations in the Prayer Book.

I have thus shown, my Lord, that you cannot be a true Churchman, nor a devout worshipper according to the forms of the Liturgy, if you advocate Sabbath desecration; and hence your desire to make such an irreligious use of your power has not only been gratuitous, unwise, and impolitic, but also a most glaring contradiction of your own professed principles.  James speaks of “the superfluity of naughtiness,” and you, my Lord, have given to the nation a public commentary on the words, and to do so have deeply reflected on your own consistency.

Some persons ask, Why did they rest on the seventh day, and not on the sixth, the eighth, or the tenth?  Our only answer to this question is, that God, “who knoweth our frame,” judged it to be best and ordained that it should be so.  A man may ask me why the earth moves on her axis from the west to the east, and I confess that I cannot give any better answer than that it is the will of the all-wise Creator.  I cannot give a reason why the centipede has so many feet.  If any person asked whether eighty, or one hundred and one would not have been as well, I must leave the matter in the hands of God.  I say, “it is the will of God,” and “God is merciful.”  Ten thousand questions in physics might be put to me which I could only answer by saying, “God is wise,” “God is powerful,” “God is love,” “God is merciful, and has made the world and our corporeal frame what they are.”

But I may add one word respecting the rest of the seventh day.  The most distinguished physiologists assure us that both men and cattle require to be relieved from toil at the end of every six days.  Gentlemen who have had much to do with horses have assured me that it was always a dead loss to rob those animals of the physical rest of the Sabbath, and that horses which are so worked invariably become diseased and die before their time.  Before observation and physiology brought out these facts, the great and merciful Creator gave the command to Moses that “the ox and the ass should rest” on the seventh day.  In the evidence on “Sabbath Observance” which was given before the “Parliamentary Committee,” and which, as a Government document, your Lordship has doubtless read, it is stated by several eminent physiologists, that man’s corporeal frame requires the rest of the Sabbath, and that to rob him of this is to injure his health and shorten his days.  Yea, they show that tea gardens and other places of excitement produce baneful effects upon the brain and nerves, and eventually lead to premature decay and dissolution.  Hence, my Lord, physiology teaches that our merciful Father, the maker of our frame, was right and kind and compassionate in ordaining one day in seven as a rest from toil.  The refreshment of sleep teaches us that the body needs repose from continuous labour, and the Sabbath was intended to be still more invigorating.

You, my Lord, must enter eternity as a child of Adam, and not as a nobleman; and you will be acquitted or condemned accordingly as you observed or violated the ten commandments.  As a sinner you may trust in the merits of Christ, but at the bar of God your faith will be tested by your observance of the decalogue.  “Faith without works is dead,” and cannot justify the soul.  You will there have no ancestry to plead, no titles to wear, and no wealth or influence to bribe.  Death, as to all these advantages or disadvantages of your earthly existence, will leave you as bare and naked as Lazarus.  Nor will forms and ceremonies be admitted as a substitute for the “weightier matters of the law.”  Baptismal regeneration, sacramental grace, the repetition of forms of prayer, going to church once a day, the half observance of the Sabbath, and zeal for tithes and offerings, will not stand in the place of obedience to the law uttered on Mount Sinai.  You must obey, or be excluded from Paradise.  Your obedience also must proceed from faith and love; not a deed must be done to merit the kingdom of heaven, but every act of piety and devotion must proceed from pure gratitude to Him who died to procure eternal life for all who believe with a practical faith.

It would be easy to show that the Fourth Commandment, far from being the “least” is one of the very “greatest” of the laws of the decalogue; for without it the other precepts would be to a great extent unheeded; man’s life would be shortened, and his soul lost.  Many have separated the ten commandments into two classes—the first four referring to Jehovah, and the remaining six to our fellow man.  The Lord Jesus evidently sums up the whole under the two ideas of “Love to God,” and “Love to our neighbour.”  We have therefore the authority of the Divine Lawgiver himself for this twofold division; and a very little reflection will show us that the Fourth Command is the bond or vinculum which unites the two tables of the law together.  “Remember the day of rest to keep it holy,” refers to the worship of God, and consequently to the first table.  “In it thou shalt do no manner of work, thou, nor thy son, thy daughter, thy man servant, thy maid servant, thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates, or jurisdiction,” embraces our neighbour or universal man as far as our influence or legislative power may extend; for your Lordship knows very well that the words, “within thy gates,” include political and magisterial dominion.  The Fourth Commandment, then, is a Janus—it has two faces and looks both ways: it regards what is due to our heavenly Father, and what is due to our brethren and sisters.  It teaches the worship which must be paid to the former, and the rest from labour which is needed by the latter.  Abolish this command, and you do away with the public worship of Jehovah; and at the same time rob the physical frame of your brother of that repose, and his mind of that edification, which are absolutely necessary to his corporeal, moral, and eternal well being.

Sabbath labour, then, my Lord, is a gross violation of the law, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; and I am persuaded that even the misled Spitalfields weavers, and others, when they understand the bearing of the whole subject, have too much humanity and justice about them to wish that workmen employed on the railway should be enslaved on the Sabbath to minister to their pleasure.  The operatives of our country generally demand, “Justice for all, and favour to none,” and therefore will hardly desire that one portion of their brethren should be deprived of the rest and comforts of home on the Sunday to enable another portion to indulge in various amusements.  This would be to imitate the slave owners, oppressors, and tyrants whom they so loudly denounce, and would prove that, were they in power, they would wield the iron rod of the despot as cruelly as any Pharaoh, Nero, or Russian Czar.  The stoker, the clerk, and the porter have bodies and souls.  Six days’ toil on a railway, over the same ground and subject to the same monotony of duties, is as fatiguing to them as driving the shuttle or superintending the spindle.  There is generally no very great variety of scenery for the clerk who gives out the tickets or the porters who traverse the platform.  I have known the poor railway clerk doomed to be at his post from eight in the morning until eleven at night during all the seven days of the week, and all this for a very paltry remuneration.  While waiting for a train, some time ago, I had the following dialogue with a young man who filled the office of clerk and porter, and attended to the telegraph:—

Myself.  Are you the only person employed here?

Clerk.  Yes, Sir.

Myself.  Are you here many hours?

Clerk.  I come before seven in the morning and leave about nine at night.

Myself.  Then you have fourteen hours a day?

Clerk.  I have two hours to spare in the middle of the day, when I go home to dinner.

Myself.  Have you to be here the same time on Sundays as weekdays?

Clerk.  Just the same.

Myself.  Can you ever go to a place of worship?

Clerk.  Never, Sir.

Myself.  How long have you been on the line?

Clerk.  Upwards of five years; and have not had an opportunity of going to a place of worship all that time.

Myself.  Did you ever attend church or chapel?

Myself.  What wages do you obtain?

Clerk.  I am paid eighteen shillings a week.

Here, my Lord, are some facts worthy of your consideration.  You have heard a great deal about Millocracy and the cruelties practised in the manufacturing districts.  I live among factories and we have “A Ten Hours Bill,” and our operatives leave work at four, some at two, o’clock on Saturday, and have the whole Sabbath to themselves.  The wages on an average are quite equal to those of this railway clerk.  And yet we are told that these masters are tyrants, oppressors, and care nothing for their workpeople.  But if so, what shall we say of the “Railocracy” which is springing up among us?  The poor railway operative in a great number of cases has no Saturday afternoon to himself, no Good Friday, no Christmas-day, no Sunday, no holiday throughout the year.  He must never attend a place of worship, and in some instances he is prohibited from reading during the hours that he is on the line.  Such a monotonous life, though spent on Parnassus, or in the pleasant vale of Tempe, would prove fatal to all physical, intellectual, and moral health.  And when we consider that some of the buildings and localities in which these poor fellows are imprisoned are almost as comfortless as an Irish cabin, and far worse than many gaols, we must blush for the system which thus violates all the dictates of humanity and religion.  We spend some thousands a year to send missionaries to the heathen, to teach barbarians to keep the Sabbath, but how little do those simple hearted savages dream that, at home, we doom our own Christian brethren to break the Sabbath and become pagans in a land of Bibles and Gospel light, or that we have Lords who wish for royal charters to sanction this cruelty and wickedness!

We have of late been very fond of commissions and commissioners.  It has been quite a money speculation.  We first create an evil and then employ men to inquire into the extent of the mischief.  We have sent into the factories, the mines, and the agricultural districts, and children have been expected to answer questions in religion which would have puzzled not a few of our Lords temporal and spiritual; but let our present Sabbath railway system continue, let the Sydenham grounds be open, and other modes of Sabbath slavery be adopted, and we shall soon want a Committee of the House of Commons, and a host of commissioners to inquire into the disease, insanity, crime, ignorance, premature deaths, and frequent accidents connected with railways.  It is well known that the late catastrophe on the North-Western line near Oxford, by which six lives were sacrificed, was mainly owing to the immoral character of the driver.  This man, with several other drivers and firemen, was drinking and carousing the night before.  His wife, the Daily News tells us, had only the day preceding the fatal collision been obliged to flee and take refuge in a neighbour’s house from his violence; and when he mounted the engine, with which he hurried himself so recklessly into destruction, and involved others in his ruin, he had just come from a pothouse, and was under the maddening influence of liquor.  It has been my lot, when waiting for night trains, to have to stay for a considerable time in station houses and elsewhere, and there listen to the conversation of drivers, firemen, porters, and others; and the profanity and obscenity would hardly have been surpassed by pagans.  And is it any wonder, seeing Sabbath breaking, in many cases, must be an essential trait in the character of the servants of our different railway companies?

No man who reverences and worships God will break his commandments by working on the Sabbath, and therefore in a very little time no truly religious person will have anything to do with railways; and hence it will come to this, that the lives and property of millions of Her Majesty’s subjects will be entrusted to Sabbath breakers who neither “fear God nor regard man.”  Formerly we were taught that Sabbath desecration led to every vice; but now, forsooth, all kinds of good are to flow from the transgression of the command of the King of Kings, and the whole community is to be placed, to a great extent, at the mercy of those who are prohibited by their masters from having any mercy on themselves.

It is now demonstrated beyond all controversy that man’s body wants rest at the end of every six days.  History and physiology, independent of religion, assure us of this fact.  If you deny to the horse, the ox, the ass, or the man the rest of the Sabbath, you kill him before his time; and consequently on the same principle of humanity on which you passed “The Ten Hours Bill,” and uphold laws against murder, we call on you to defend the clerks, porters, drivers, and other servants of the Sydenham speculators from the evils of Sabbath occupation.  It is said by some that we are a godless age; and by others that we are a most enlightened and religious generation; and somehow or other both these classes coalesce to crush the poor labourer and shorten his life by robbing him of his Sunday.  The godless people beg us not to be so fanatical as to make any law on any subject on which Jehovah has legislated; and the enlightened and hyper-religious entreat us not to sanction any statute respecting the right of the labourer to rest from toil on the seventh day, because it is a religious question!!  You may make a “Ten Hours Bill” because it is not mentioned in the Bible; you may even enact a law against murder and theft, although both are mentioned in the Word of God; but alas! alas! to make a law to save the poor tired, worn out, weary, oppressed operative or clerk from being injured by Sabbath labour, would be to un-Protestant yourself and prove that you do not understand religious liberty!!  As if religious liberty consisted in the liberty to kill our brethren and sisters by continuous labour!!  If there had been no Fourth Commandment, given by God himself, we should have heard nothing about this matter.  There was no Fourth Command about the “Ten Hours Bill” and therefore it passed; but now our poor operatives and peasants are to be robbed of their rights and burdened with over work, because their heavenly Father has said, “Remember the rest-day to keep it holy.  Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work; but the seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt do no manner of work,” &c.  Therefore, as Jehovah has said we shall do “no manner of work,” you, my Lord, propose that a royal charter shall be given to railway directors to enable them to exact labour from their servants on the “Lord’s-day.”  Who can after this doubt our piety, our enlightenment, our staunch Protestantism, or our love to religious liberty?

Then how absurd to suppose that we must not legislate concerning the Sabbath, because Jehovah has legislated on it!  And yet we legislate on murder, theft, &c., although both these crimes are forbidden in the decalogue.  Is this because there are no Sydenham speculators in the way of observing these commands?  But if we legislate concerning the right of the labourer to rest on the Sabbath, we shall prevent certain gentlemen from robbing the poor to enrich themselves, and from shortening the lives of one body of citizens to increase the profits of another.  Of course it would be vastly inconvenient to give every one license to rob, steal, and take away life; but forsooth, the case is much changed when, instead of licensing all to plunder and destroy, you make a monopoly of the business, and grant to Crystal Palace adventurers the privilege of defrauding their servants of one day in seven, of corrupting the morals of their fellow citizens, and shortening their days by oppressive toil.  There is a tribunal before which Lords and Commons, employers and employed must appear, and before which a director has lately been suddenly summoned.  There, my Lord, the highwayman who robbed with the pistol, and the noble or squire who more genteelly, with an Act of Parliament, or royal charter, plundered the labourer of one day in seven, will be placed in the same company and indicted for the same offence; and where also those who destroyed their brethren more speedily by prussic acid; and those who did it more slowly, but not less cruelly, by hard and continuous labour, will be ranked with Cain and his fraternity.  Nor will it be any mitigation of their crime to plead that they would have granted “A Seventh Day Bill” as well as “A Ten Hours Bill,” if it had not been that the Bible forbad Sabbath labour.  But as the Universal Father out of pure love to his children commanded that labour should not be exacted on the seventh day, therefore it behoved human legislators to countenance Sunday occupations, lest by following the dictates of heaven, of justice and humanity, they should violate the principles of religious liberty!!!

And it must be remembered that but few of the men and women employed will have time to enter a place of worship on the former part of the Lord’s-day.  Granted that the visitors to the grounds may very devoutly go to church and pay their devotions to the Eternal before they hasten to break his Sabbath!! yet firemen, porters, waiters, &c., will hardly have time to repair to the sanctuary before they put the engines, &c., in readiness for their masters’ customers; so that the majority of these railway servants will be deprived of the opportunity of worshipping God and learning their duty.  Here then, my Lord, will be robbery and cruelty of the worst kind, and therefore we call on you as a man to interfere between the oppressor and the oppressed.  If you never went to church, and prayed that God would have mercy upon you and “incline your heart to keep the Fourth Commandment”; if you disbelieved revelation altogether; if you were a Jew, Turk, infidel, or the most ultra dissenter, yet then we would appeal to your humanity and entreat you to interpose the shield of the law and protect the servants of the Sydenham directors, and indeed all labourers, from being robbed and destroyed by Sabbath occupations.

You are therefore, my Lord, about to inflict incalculable evils and injuries upon a large portion of the most valuable of your fellow citizens.  The working classes are very important members of the commonwealth.  We cannot all be kings and queens; and trade, commerce, agriculture, manufactures, railways and domestic life, would be in a very pitiable condition if all were lords, squires, great capitalists, and Crystal Palace speculators.  Our clerks, operatives, peasants, hard handed fustain jackets, smock frocks, &c., make the wealth and the comforts of the nation.

“Princes and peers may flourish or may fade—
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
If once destroyed, can never be supplied.”

Should your Lordship, or any of my readers, be doubtful respecting the physical evils arising from Sabbath labour, I may again refer to the Blue Book, containing the Parliamentary Evidence respecting Sabbath occupations.  The testimony of the medical men and especially of Dr. Farr on this point is particularly worthy of notice.  I may also quote the following words of another well known London Physician of long experience and great practice.  The venerable Dr. Conquest of Finsbury Square, in a letter to the churchwardens of St. Luke’s, says,

“I regret my inability to be at the vestry this evening.  Had it been in my power to be there, I should have endeavoured to prove, as a medical man, that it is absolutely necessary for the human constitution to have one day in seven for rest, because without it, its powers become enfeebled and impaired.—Daily exertion and excitement and fatigue during the week, without this one day’s rest, prematurely break down the strength and vigour of the animal system, shorten life, and deprive old age of that energy and cheerfulness which usually attend it in those who have rested from mental and bodily toil on the Lord’s-day.”