25 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



age ; but it is not pleasant to see his features reproduced, on however 

 small a scale, before an educated nation in the latter half of the nine- 

 teenth century. 



Notwithstanding their strictness about the Sabbath, which pos- 

 sibly carried with it the usual excess of a reaction, some of the strait- 

 est of the Puritan sect saw clearly that unremitting attention to 

 business, Avhether religious or secular, was unhealthy. Considering 

 recreation to be as necessary to health as daily food, they exhorted 

 parents and masters, if they would avoid the desecration of the Sab- 

 bath, to allow to children and servants time for honest recreation on 

 other days. They might have done well to inquire whether even Sun- 

 day devotions might not, without " moral culpability " on their part, 

 keep the minds of children and servants too long upon the stretch. 

 I fear many of the good men who insist on a Judaic observance of 

 the Sabbath, and who dwell upon the peace and blessedness to be 

 derived from a proper use of the Lord's day, generalize beyond their 

 data, applying the experience of the individual to the case of man- 

 kind. What is a conscious joy and blessing to themselves they can 

 not dream of as being a possible misery, or even a curse, to others. 

 It is right that your most spiritually-minded men men who, to use a 

 devotional phrase, enjoy the closest walk with God should be your 

 pastors. But they ought also to be practical men, able to look not 

 only on their personal feelings, but on the capacities of humanity at 

 large, and willing to make their rules and teachings square with these 

 capacities. There is in some minds a natural bias toward religion, as 

 there is in others toward poetry, art, or mathematics ; but the poet, 

 artist, or mathematician, who would seek to impose upon others not 

 possessing his tastes the studies which give him delight, would be 

 deemed an intolerable despot. The philosopher Fichte was wont to 

 contrast his mode of rising into the atmosphere of faith with the ex- 

 perience of others. In his case the process, he said, was purely intel- 

 lectual. Through reason he reached religion ; while in the case of 

 many whom he knew this process was both unnecessary and unused, 

 the bias of their minds sufficing to render faith, without logic, clear 

 and strong. In making rules for the community these natural diffi!r- 

 ences must be taken into account. The yoke which is easy to the few 

 may be intolerable to the many, not only defeating its own immediate 

 purpose, but frequently introducing recklessness or hypocrisy into 

 minds which a franker and more liberal treatment would have kept 

 free from both.* Nineteenth Century. 



* " When our Puritan friends," says Mr. Frederick Robertson, " talk of the blessings 

 of the. Sabbath, we may ask them to remember some of its curses." Other and more 

 serious evils than those recounted by llr. Robertson may, I fear, be traced to the system 

 of Sabbath observance pursued in many of our schools. At the risk of shocking some 

 worthy persons, I would say that the invention of an invigorating game for fine Sunday 

 afternoons, and healthy in-door amusement for wet ones, would prove infinitely more 

 effectual as an aid to moral purity than most of our plans of religious meditation. 



