It is generally, I believe, supposed in England, that Sunday is, for the most part, a day of pleasure in Roman Catholic countries only; but such is far from being the case. In a Protestant University I have been seriously asked whether it was really true that, with us, people abstained, with a view to the religious observance of the Sabbath, from public amusements on that holy day. Such an answer as I was happy in being able to give, consistently with truth, excited the utmost surprise !*

Since the above period, much more attention has, I am convinced, been paid to the religious observance of Sunday in England; and when we consider how strong the sanctions of Scripture are, and the suggestions consequently of the consciences of all who believe in Scripture must be upon this point, how can it be otherwise? How is it possible to suppose that, with the progress of sound learning and religious education, and of philosophy, no longer infidel, the observance of the Christian Sabbath will not both spread and be more in conformity with the ends merciful and gracious for which it was

* Yet about this very time, Cowper was bewailing the general desecration of the Sabbath in England, and predicting its ultimate abolition.

"Oh, Italy! thy Sabbaths will be soon

Our Sabbaths, closed with mummery and buffoon.
Preaching and pranks will share the motley scene,
Ours parcell'd out, as thine have ever been,

God's worship, and the mountebank between."

The Progress of Error.-Dr. H.

divinely appointed ? * I say advisedly appointed, for surely the injunction (Exodus, xx. 2.) is not peculiar to the Israelites. We find from Exodus xvi. that they were acquainted with the Sabbath, however much it may have fallen into neglect, before Moses received the Table of the Law at Sinai; and the very terms in which the reason of the ordinance is expressed by him, plainly describe it as of primeval origin, and of perpetual and universal obligation.

"The seventh commandment," says Archbishop Wake, "is as obligatory upon us as it ever was upon the Jews, though not exactly after the same manner. We worship, as they did, the God, who

in six days created the heaven and the earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day;' and in acknowledgment thereof, we stand obliged with them, to keep a seventh day of rest after six of labour. But then, as they worshipped this God under the peculiar character of the God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,' so were they directed to take that particular day, the seventh of the week, for their Sabbath, upon which he completed their deliverance; and strictly to abstain from all bodily labour upon it. Now in this respect we differ from them. We worship God,

• Bishop Horsley's admirable sermon on the Text "The Sabbath was nade for man and not man for the Sabbath," should be read by every one.

the Creator of the world, under a much higher and more divine character; as He is our Father and Deliverer by Jesus Christ our Lord; who, on the first day of the week, rose from the dead, and thereby put an end to the Jewish dispensation. And in testimony of this, we keep the first day of the week for our Sabbath, according to the practice of the Apostles; and so profess ourselves to be the servants of the true God, through the covenant, which He has been pleased to make with mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord."*

But let us, for a moment, suppose that, under the Christian dispensation, a seventh day of rest after six of labour were merely a matter of conventual arrangement, as the Quakers will have it to be; what, let me ask, is to prevent other societies from fixing on a different day of the week, or month, for their day of rest, or from declining to set apart any day, as happened during the reign of infidelity in France? To what caprice, to say no worse of it, must not such a state of things lead?

And here I cannot help expressing my surprise that in this enlightened age, with the advantage of so many learned and judicious comments on both the Old and New Testament, the peculiar religious tenets of the

Society of Friends" should continue to maintain the hold they appear to do on their minds. In their intercourse with the world, this does but occasion a little

*Mant's Bible.

inconvenience, and, sometimes, a little offence; but if I am right in my view of the nature and extent of their delusion, I cannot but dread its dangerous tendency in as far as they are themselves concerned.

66

Wherever there is great error, there will be sure to be inconsistency. Quakers deny the divine appointment of the Sabbath, but they approve of a day of rest once a week for the purpose of religious improvement, and they wisely adopt our Sunday. Now what objection can there be, on the same principle, to setting apart an additional day occasionally-such as Christmas-day," to meditate on the birth of Christ— "Good Friday," to meditate on his Crucifixion-or any day appointed by government to deprecate impending wrath, or to offer up thanksgivings for escape from it. There is nothing, in so doing, that savours of carnal ordinances; nothing that can fairly be objected to by the most spiritual worshippers of Christ. Common courtesy to their neighbours, and to the constituted authorities to whom they are indebted for protection, seems at least to require that they should assist, by closing their shops, in preserving the solemnity of such days. And yet I have known them hesitate, nay refuse, to do so!

But I must, for a while at least, quit these graver themes, and not lose sight of the subordinate personages of our party, nor of the minor occurrences and topics of conversation.

L

I shall pass over our visit on the fourth day to the Bielman's Höhle, a celebrated stalactitic cavern near Elbingerode, to make mention of a waltzing party,* which, soon after our leaving the above cavern, attracted our notice. The principal belle of the party, over a petticoat of four colours, wore an apron with red and white stripes, the body of her dress was black, red, and white, her neck-kerchief black and yellow, whilst her very high-heeled shoes were ornamented with buckles of the largest dimensions. Her partner

was dressed in a blue jacket lined with white, culottes de cuir, white stockings, and shoes with likewise enormous buckles; his head-dress consisted of curls still retaining their papers and sticking out an inch or two from his ears, with a tail two or three feet long, depending from behind; the whole being surmounted by a red and white nightcap.

The couples were turning, each round its own centre, and all, with characteristic gesticulation, round a decorated May-pole, to the music of a venerable fiddle, and were nothing disconcerted by our stopping to look at them, as we did for nearly half an hour.

Waltzing, in England, is often little more than whirling round and round, till all heads are giddy; but in

* A very amusing description of this party, from the pen of Coleridge, appeared in a pretty Annual, "The Amulet," for the year 1829. And I find it again in his interesting "Letters from Germany," inserted in the New Monthly Magazine for October 1835, already alluded to.