too much ground to suspect that they would be ready to part at a very cheap rate with those privileges which their fathers so dearly won. 'O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint.' If ever the time come when the attachment of the people of Scotland to Presbytery shall be loosened and give way, its effects will not be confined to religion. To this attachment-to the soul-inspiring recollections by which it has been cherished-to the unfettered genius of our worship-to our exemption from the benumbing bondage of recurring holidays, political or religious, and from forms of prayer dictated on particular occasions by the Court, and to the freedom of discussion yet retained in our ecclesiastical assemblies, we hesitate not to ascribe, more than to any other cause, the preservation of public spirit and independence, which many things in our political situation and local circumstances have a powerful tendency to weaken and to crush. Those who view every expression of these feelings with jealousy, will, of course, encourage or connive at whatever is calculated to blunt them. But all who wish well to the public spirit of Scotland, as well as to her religious purity, are called upon to deprecate and resist such acts of conformity. And this resistance cannot be opposed to the evil at too early a stage. 'Principiis obsta; sero medicina paratur, ENGLAND. No country has owed more to the Lord's Day than Scotland, and in none was the institution more indebted to the Reformation. There it rose at once, from a position almost on a level with Rome's crowd of fasts and feasts, to its proper honours as the one permanent holy day of the Christian Church. In other Protestant lands its claims were neither so definitely settled nor so fully recognised. Among the evils remaining unredressed, not the least important were certain days of man's consecration—those plants, which, as not of divine planting, the Reformers would have "rooted up," but which, left to cluster round the sacred tree of 1 Miscell. Writings, pp. 574, 585. liberty, drew to themselves the nourishment necessary to its vigour and luxuriance. It is a matter rather of regret than marvel, that these great and good men, in exposing the prevalent error that the observance, however perfunctory, of rites and holy days, atoned for sin and exhausted moral obligation, should have let fall expressions in reference to the Lord's Day, hardly reconcilable with their decided testimonies on other occasions to its authority and excellence, or with their practical regard to its claims. Nor is it surprising, though also to be regretted, that amidst their manifold engagements they should have failed to present in their writings a full exposition of sabbatic doctrine and law, instead of those unsatisfactory notices of the subject which an able writer has thus described: "There is no regular and systematic treatise on the Sabbath in the works of the more eminent divines of that period; it is only incidentally alluded to in connexion with other points, such as the power of the Church in decreeing ceremonies, or briefly discussed in their commentaries on Scripture; or, finally, made the subject of a few paragraphs under the Fourth Commandment, in their elements of Christian doctrine. A few minutes might suffice to read what each one of the Reformers has left on record concerning the permanent obligation of the Sabbath; indeed, that part of the question is rather summarily decided on than calmly and satisfactorily examined." 1 It is a peculiar responsibility of such men that they exert a powerful and far-reaching influence. Scotland's Reformers did early justice to the Lord's Day, and so, notwithstanding some unrighteous and violent attempts from without to wrest it from her, she still retains, bedimmed though it is, her sabbatic crown. The countries of the Reformation abroad felt for a time the impulse of the doctrines taught, and of the example set, by Zuinglius, Luther, and Calvin; but as Christianity and its weekly holy day, which are mutually conservative and stimulating, were not fully adjusted to each other, nor consequently brought to act with concentrated power on the people, the decay of both ensued ; and though a war on the Sabbath question (from which Scotland was happily free) kindled by a spark from this country, prevailed for a century in Holland, and extended to parts of Germany, yet as 1 Fairbairn's Typology, vol. ii. p. 462, C it ended in what Hengstenberg calls "the gradual advance of more liberal views," that is, such views as have left these countries well-nigh without a religion at all, another must yet be waged over the entire continent of Europe. The Reformation in England was not so thorough as in some countries, but the spirit of its people was too ardent to let a great question be compromised and slumber, as occurred in so many Protestant States. Hence to that country accrued the glory, as respected one party-the discredit as regarded another, of being the scene of the earliest conflict within the Christian Church on subjects affecting the Divine authority, the sacred character, and thus the very existence of one of the noblest, most indispensable, and most beneficent institutions of Heaven. When the claims of the Lord's Day are advocated on the ground that the doctrine of its Divine authority was held by the Church down to the time of the Reformation, it is not necessary to prove that the institution was never misrepresented or misapplied. It is enough to the argument that the doctrine was received by the universal Church, although she chose to add holidays, superstitious rites, and one of six ecclesiastical precepts to the simple ordinance of Heaven. Nor is this argument, founded as it is on the harmony of many centuries, destroyed by the fact that sabbatic unanimity was disturbed at the Reformation, unless it can be shown that the ordinance was the cause of the disturbance. That peaceful ordinance, however, was guiltless. The Reformers were not aggrieved at the celebration of the weekly holy day. This formed no reason of their protest against Rome, or of their secession from her pale. It was her own interminable contrivances that at last rent the Church; and it was this, her will-worship, imitated naturally enough by one class, but rejected by another, which largely contributed to alienate from each other the friends of the Reformation. Rome, ever boasting of her concord, has least exemplified it in her own community, and has been the chief cause of the divisions and distractions in civil and ecclesiastical society around her ;-and thus new evidence has been added to the old, in proof of the Divine power of an institute which has continued to exist among Protestant sects and controversies, not less than it was, and still is, preserved amidst all the corruptions of the Papacy. Although nothing entitled to the name of a general or prolonged contest on our subject, except in so far as it was indirectly concerned with that on holidays, was the immediate result of the Reformation, yet there wanted not indications, then and afterwards, that diversified, and in some instances confused notions of the institution were entertained, arising from the system with which it had been mixed up, and showing that an open collision was, in the case of England at least, at hand. Luther, in his zeal against the profane and mischievous perversions of Divine commandments and ordinances in the Church of Rome, laid himself open, by strong expressions respecting the Mosaic Law and the Sabbath, to the charge preferred against him by John Agricola, of affirming the abrogation of the Decalogue--a charge which he vehemently denied, and obliged his accuser to retract, though only to be renewed.1 Cardinal Tolet maintained, "that the observance of the Lord's Day is not a law of God, but an ecclesiastical precept, and a custom of the faithful."2 The position was substantially asserted by Sir Thomas More in his Dialogues, where he avowed that the first day came in place of the seventh by virtue of tradition, and that the observance of the Sunday rested on the commandment of the Church,-"The Sundays hear thou mass." It is not for us to attempt harmonizing the views of such men with the doctrine taught in their Church throughout her history even to the present day-that the apostles changed the Jewish Sabbath into the Lord's Day, and that the duties of the latter are prescribed in the Decalogue. In his Answer to Sir Thomas More (1530), William Tyndale wrote slightingly of those circumstances of time to which the Church attached so superstitious and fatal an importance; and, as extremes meet, seemed to claim for the Christian people a right to alter the stated day of worship, no less unwarranted than that assumed by his opponent for the hierarchy in its appointment. "We be lords," he says, the Sabbath, and may yet change it into the Monday, or any other day, as we see need; or may make every tenth day holy day only, if we see a cause why; we may make two every week if it were expedient, and one not enough to teach the people. Neither 1 Rutherford's Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist, pp. 68-80. 2 Toleti Insti. Sacerdot, lib. iv. c. 13. "over was there any cause to change it from the Saturday, but to put difference between us and the Jews, and lest we should become servants unto the day after their superstition. Neither needed we any holy day at all, if the people might be taught without it."1 Tyndale, having finished his education at Oxford and Cambridge, conceived the purpose of translating the Scriptures into the English language, but finding it impossible to accomplish this in his native country, proceeded to the Continent, where he had completed a version of the New Testament with portions of the old, and had had the satisfaction of seeing many editions of the former printed and circulated, when he fell a victim to assassination in 1536, offering up with his last breath, the prayer, "Lord, open the eyes of the king of England!" Although it does not appear that he had personal intercourse with Luther, his residence on the Continent had led him to adopt, in reference to the Sabbath, the same strange phraseology, which appears, however, in both cases, to have been compatible with substantially sound views, and reverent observance of the institution. "When the Sunday came," says John Fox, then went he to some one merchant's chamber or other (in Antwerp), whither came many other merchants, and unto them would he read some one parcel of Scripture; the which proceeded so fruitfully, sweetly, and gently from him, much like to the writing of John the Evangelist, that it was a heavenly comfort and joy to the audience to hear him read the Scriptures; likewise after dinner he spent an hour in the same manner." Frith, his convert and friend, who suffered martyrdom for the Protestant faith in 1533, had in the year of his death written his Treatise on Baptism-in which, touching on the Sabbath, he follows Tyndale's train of thought, and asserts the same liberty for Christians to choose a day of worship, but with this difference, that the right was in the hands of "the forefathers," or apostles, and that "though they might have kept Saturday with the Jews as a thing indifferent, yet they did much better." Without dwelling on the statement of the Convocation in 1536-"That sith the Sabbath-day was ordained for man's use, and therefore ought to give way to the necessity and be 1 Works (1831) vol. ii. p. 101. Anderson's Annals of the English Bible, vol. i. p. 521. |