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has been seized by some of the avowed and clamorous friends of church and state, and made a channel of private calumny and public ridicule of all eminent virtue and piety. SUNDAY STAGES are a second invention of a novel kind. They were some years back uniformly suspended on the Lord's day, that "our cattle and our servants might rest as well as we;" now they openly violate the decencies of public worship-they pass our churches during divine servicethey detain the inn-keeper from the house of God-they tempt our people to venture on Sunday journeys. VESSELS OF PLEASURE impelled by steam, have just been added to the inventions of the Sabbath-breaker, and thousands are conveyed on the Lord's day, during the months of summer, to the various spots on our coast, where pleasure and dissipation may drown conscience and the remains of a pious education. Commercial speculations for MORE EXPEDITIOUS TRAVELLING, by means of the same process, are also calculated upon the supposition of regularly and systematically profaning and tempting others to profane the Sabbath. Our HOUSES OF COMMERCE, again, have been deserted of late years on the Lord's day by their masters, and are left to the discretion of clerks and shopmen, to violate the Sabbath without restraint or control.

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New classes of our people are thus pushed into the fatal vortex of Sunday dissipation. Each humbler order imitates the vices of the rank immediately above it. The example infects the very remotest classes. All are learning by degrees to encroach upon the sanctity of the holy day of God. "Hand joins in hand. One encourages another. Religious repose and rest in God as a distinct duty of Christians, is more and more discredited; and the false notion that the Sabbath was ordained for what is termed innocent amusement, as well as for the worship of Almighty God, is more and more avowed.

3. Then inquire we next into THE COUNTENANCE which the nobles and princess of our land give to this Sundayviolation. Much of the character of national sins arises from the conduct of the great, from the open avowal or disavowal of God, which they are found upon the whole to make. I ask, then,-with grief and shame I ask,-does not the prevalent example of the great go to encourage, to create, to render necessary in large circles of dependants,

the open breach of the day of God? Do not they often profess that public worship is chiefly needful to restrain the common people? Do not they avow, that religion is little more than a state-engine? Does not their too general conduct authorize and embolden the neglect of the Lord's day, the omission of public worship, the frivolous engagements of the after division of the Sabbath, the enormous evils of Sunday dinners, Sunday visits, Sunday music-parties, Sunday diversions? Do we not read on every Monday, the catalogue of the festivals, conversaziones, assemblies for music-sacred music, as it is profanely termed—which desecrated the preceding day? And do not these evils begin with those of the highest rank-with nobles, ministers of state, princes? And does not the eye of God behold all this, and mark the aggravations of its guilt? Do not the gentry and nobility form a prominent and influential part of a nation in its collective capacity? Is not their example the standard by which thousands form their notions of morals and of Sunday obligation?

4. But may we not, ought we not to go farther than this? It is not merely countenance afforded by the great, but it is A SINFUL CONNIVANCE on the part of legislators, ministers of state, magistrates, clergy, persons in authority, and with natural influence entrusted to them, which constitutes the real amount of national crime on this subject. If the gentry, clergy, and magistracy, have used such moral power as God and the laws and usages of their country have committed to them, for the honor of the Sabbath-and which power they are employing daily on a thousand trifling topics which interest them-then there is no national guilt incurred in this respect. But what is the fact? Let conscience speak. It is to the eternal God we appeal, who is the searcher of every heart. Have not legislators, and magistrates both in their private and their collective capacity, connived, and do they not connive, at the violation of the holy law of the Sabbath? Do they not mock too, often at its divine authority? Do they not shrink from avowing their reverence for religion as a spiritual subjection of man to the obedience of his Maker? Alas! it is too well known, that little of their attention can be obtained on these subjects that occasions are perpetually lost for diminishing the evils of Sabbath-breaking-that the miserable limits of the

three or four hours of public services are considered sufficient, in the framing of acts of parliament, for the Sabbath; and all the other hours are resigned without scruple to the world and folly--that the too frequent excuse of magistrates and individual members of either House, is that the temper of the times will not endure religious measures to be brought forward. Thus the influence of persons in authority is on the whole decidedly unfavorable; they discountenance spiritual religion; they refuse to put into execution the laws actually in force, and they decline preparing new ones-they frown on active individuals who would call on them to maintain the honor of the day of God. How was the proposal of Sunday drilling, for instance, during the late war, welcomed and admitted for a course of years; though the voice of bold remonstrance afterwards prevailed for its repeal? How were the petitions and remonstrances early made against Sunday newspapers, rejected; and the later ones scorned and contemned? What attention has been paid to the denial of the Sunday to the colonial slave, and to the atrocious evils of his Sunday market? How, again, do individual ministers of state, and individual magistrates, receive the applications made for the suppression of Sabbath-breaking! What encouragement does the conscientious clergyman, or minister, or parochial officer, receive from the magistrates, in his attempts to check the evil? Where is there the individual in either chamber of parliament, now ready to take up the question concerning the law of the Sabbath, reduce the existing statutes to a consistent code, and strengthen them with such new enactments as the change of circumstances, since the time of the second Charles, may require?

5. And next allow me, as a minister of religion, to join in the confession of the share which I, together with my brethren, have borne in the guilt which we are now considering. Too many of us, THE CLERGY, have not sufficiently enforced the duty of the observation of the Sabbath: we have not expounded the doctrine--we have not urged the authority-we have not protested as we should against the violation--we have not sustained by a firm example, the honor of this holy and most ancient of institutions-we have been cowardly, tame, silent, indifferent. Some of us have connived sinfully at the enormous mischief-have

shrunk from measures of energy and courage--have rather "followed the multitude to do evil," than struggled manfully, and at all hazards, against the current.

The religious public also--who reverence and observe to a certain extent the Sabbath--have shared and are sharing the guilt. They listen to objections. They read the works which plausibly sap the divine obligations of the Lord's day. Their minds are poisoned. They lose that firm standing on which they formerly planted their feet. Their family habits are unfavorable. Their own example is in some things dubious. The estimate which their children and house-holds form of the Sabbath, low. They do not contend boldly, in public and private, against the sin of dishonoring the day, as their fathers did. Compare the last generation of evangelical and pious Christian households with the present--the decay is manifest--that is, the national guilt is augmented.

6. For in truth it amounts to this-let God be judge-THERE IS A TOO GENERAL INDIFFERENCE, COLDNESS, AND EVEN SCORN, amongst large numbers, to the sanctification of the Lord's day, and to remedial measures for retaining its honorable observance--which stamps the broad mark of public connivance on the sin of Sabbathbreaking. Thank God, we are not so deeply sunk in this evil, as many of the continential nations--Thank God, much honor is still put upon the holy appointment-thank God, a remnant of devoted Christians continues to hallow it aright; thank God, "a pillar is raised, as it were, on the border of the land unto the Lord." Thank God our iniquities, as we trust are not yet full; and a revival of deep concern for religion, and for the day of religion, is, as we hope, going on. But we must still look the facts full in the face. Our real repentance and reformation will depend on our conviction of our actual delinquency. Have we, then, or have we not, as a people, including the classes professing the peculiar grace of Christ, departed from the Lord, in conniving and sitting calmly by, when his name was polluted and the Sabbath profaned? Is not a portion of the indifference and scorn poured upon this institution chargeable upon us--us the ministers of religion-us the people of God? Would the names of reproach cast upon the religious observation of the day and

upon those who sustain it, be so keen, so approbrious, so extended, if the standard of general sentiment had been nearer that of the Scriptures?

Yes, brethren, as the various classes in the Jewish nation at the time of Nehemiah, had departed from their God, and had joined in polluting the Sabbath; so have too many in all classes, in our own country, departed from their Savior, and united, unconsciously in some cases and imperceptibly, in conniving at the violation of the Christian Šabbath.

It is time for us to return to the Lord. Steps have been lately taken by persons high in authority, which encourage hope of improvement. Let us, then, in order to this, II. Consider THE NATIONAL JUDGMENTS which we may too certainly dread, if we repent not.

Where

For nations rise and fall. A retributive justice is going through the world. No nation, however powerful, however wise, however free, however prosperous, can resist the divine arm. Where is the empire of the Babylonians, of the Medo-Persians, of the Grecians, of the Romans? is the power and grandeur of Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne! Look over the map of Europe during the last half century: what nations have not been overthrown, shaken to their centre, visited with the most frightful calamities? Except our favored country, there was hardly another which escaped the actual sword of war. And in our own previous annals, what scenes of bloodshed, what overthrows of royal houses, what civil contests, what changes do not appear!

I open the Bible and I see that this fall of empires is connected with the guilt of the different nations, and especially of those which were the most eminently privileged. "You only have I known of all the nations of the earth, therefore will I punish you for your iniquity;"* such is the divine rule of proceeding. "For judgment must begin at the house of God, and if it first begins with us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?" There is the spot where judgments first alight. "But in the fourth generation they shall come again, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full;" the measure is rising

* Amos iii. 2.

1 Pet. iv. 17.

Gen. xv. 16.

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