20 THE SABBATH. 



note these Sunday judgments, the poor miners of Blan- 

 tyre are blown to pieces, while engaged in their sinless 

 week-day toil. A little further off the bodies of two 

 hundred and sixty workers, equally innocent of Sabbath- 

 breaking, are entombed at Abercarne. Dinas holds its 

 sixty bodies, while the present year has furnished a 

 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 

 prescientific 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 nineteenth 

 century. 



Notwithstanding their strictness about the Sabbath, 

 which possibly carried with it the usual excess of a re- 

 action, some of the straitest of the Puritan sect saw 

 clearly that unremitting attention to business, whether 

 religious or secular, was unhealthy. These considered 

 recreation to be as necessary to health as daily food ; 

 and hence exhorted parents and masters, if they would 

 avoid the desecration of the Sabbath, to allow to chil- 

 dren and servanfs time for honest recreation on other 

 days. They might have done well to inquire whether 

 even Sunday devotions might not, without ' moral cul- 

 pability ' on their part, keep the minds of children and 

 servants too long upon the stretch. I fear many of the 

 good men who insisted, and 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, generalise beyond their data, applying the 

 experience of the individual to the case of mankind. 

 What is a conscious joy and blessing to themselves they 

 cannot dream of as being a possible misery, or even a 



