THE SABBATH. 21 



curse, to others. It is right that your most spiritually- 

 minded men — men who, to use a devotional phrase, en- 

 joy 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 towards religion, as there 

 is in others towards 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 

 experience of others. In his case the process, he said, 

 was purely intellectual. 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 differences 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. 1 



The moods of the times — the ' climates of opinion,' 



1 'When our Puritan friends,' says Mr. Frederick Robertson, 

 'talk of the blessings of the Sabbath, we may ask them to remem- 

 ber some of its curses.' Other and more serious evils than those 

 recounted by Mr. 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 indoor 

 amusement for wet ones, would prove infinitely more effectual as an 

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



