THE SABBATH. 255 



logical requirements of the question. "Week-day drownings were not 

 dwelt upon, and nobody knew or cared how the question of propor- 

 tion stood between the two classes of bathers. The civil war was 

 regarded as a punishment for Sunday desecration. The fire of Lon- 

 don and a subsequent great fire in Edinburgh were ascribed to this 

 cause ; while the fishermen of Berwick lost their trade through catch- 

 ing salmon on Sunday. A Nonconformist minister named John Wells, 

 whose huge volume is described by Cox as " the most tedious of all 

 the Puritan productions about the Sabbath," is specially copious in 

 illustration. A drunken peddler, " fraught with commodities " on Sun- 

 day, drops into a river : God's retributive justice is seen in the fact. 

 Wells traveled far in search of instances. One Utrich Schroetorus, a 

 Swiss, while playing at dice on the Lord's day, lost heavily, and 

 apparently to gain the devil to his side broke out into this horrid 

 blasphemy : " If fortune deceive me now I will thrust my dagger into 

 the body of God." Whereupon he threw the dagger upward. It 

 disappeared, and five drops of blood, which afterward proved indel- 

 ible, fell upon the gaming-table. The devil then appeared, and with 

 a hideous noise carried off the vile blasphemer. His two companions 

 fared no better. One was struck dead and turned into worms, the 

 other was executed. A vintner who on the Lord's day tempted the 

 passers-by with a pot of wine was carried into the air by a whirlwind 

 and never seen more. " Let us read and tremble," adds Mr. Wells. 

 At Tidworth a man broke his leg on Sunday while playing at foot- 

 ball. By a secret judgment of the Lord the wound turned into a 

 gangrene, and in pain and terror the criminal gave up the ghost. 



You may smile at these recitals, but is there not a survival of John 

 Wells still extant among us ? Are there not people in our midst so 

 well informed regarding "the secret judgments of the Lord" as to be 

 able to tell you their exact value and import, from the damaging of 

 the share-market through the running of Sunday trains to the calam- 

 itous overthrow of a railway bridge ? Alphonso of Castile boasted 

 that, if he had been consulted at the beginning of things, he could have 

 saved the Creator some worlds of trouble. It would not be difficult 

 to give the God of our more rigid Sabbatarians a lesson in justice and 

 mercy ; for his alleged judgments savor but little of either. How 

 are calamities to be classified ? Almost within ear-shot of those who 

 note these Sunday judgments, the poor miners of Blantyre are blown 

 to pieces, while engaged in their sinless week-day toil. A little far- 

 ther off the bodies of two hundred and sixty workers, equally inno- 

 cent of Sabbath-breaking, are entombed at Abercarne. Dinas holds 

 its sixty bodies, while the present year has furnished its fearful tale of 

 similar disasters. Whence comes the vision which differentiates the 

 Sunday calamity from the week-day calamity, seeing in the one a 

 judgment of Heaven, and in the other a natural event? We may 

 wink at the ignorance of John Wells, for he lived in a pre-scientific 



