The Puritan and the Continental Sabbaths.

The "Puritan" Sabbath and the "Continental" Sabbath are set off against each other as two great types, and each is praised, each heartily hated, by opposite parties. In each case injustice is done both to the thing praised and to the thing condemned. New England Puritanism was much more than the ascetic monstrosity which its modern scoffers mock at. That austere moral strength of which the Puritan Sabbath was the natural seventeenth century sign—pre-eminently its sign, and but very slightly its cause—has been the iron in the nation's blood down to the seventh generation. Would we had more of it left! On the other hand, the Continental Sabbath is by no means the abomination of desolation and profligacy described by those who fear it. Sunday is the home-day there as here; the general rest-day there, though not so much as here; the day of worship there as well as here, though in a less degree; and, besides this, it is there far more a recreation-day than here,—and by this last difference it goes so far towards redressing the balance of comparative good between the two days there and here, that I am not at all sure that, on the whole, our American Sunday deserves the higher praise.

Scotland perhaps out-puritans New England in this respect, and as the late Dr. Guthrie, of Edinburgh, was true Scotch Presbyterian on the subject his testimony is noteworthy. "We counted on one occasion, in Paris, thirty-three theatres and places of amusement open on the Sabbath day," he writes. Coming home, "in one hour we saw in London and Edinburgh, with all her churches and schools and piety, more drunkenness than we saw in five long months in guilty Paris." In the controversy about running the Sunday trains in Scotland, page 79 Dr. Norman McLeod, with the evidence of the Scotch Sabbaths before his eyes, took the position that, "in proportion to the strict enforcement of Sabbatarianism, there would be multiplied those practical inconsistencies, dishonesties, and Pharisaic sophistries, which prove in all ages supremely detrimental to morality and religion." The outburst of popular feeling against these views was amazing, but he never retracted a syllable. Or again, "At the Synod of the Scotch Church, in 1867, the Puritan Sabbath was openly proclaimed a failure, and ample evidence was adduced in proof, one of the speakers declaring that Continental Sabbaths produced no parallel to the disgraceful behavior which marked the day in Scotland." I do not mean to correlate the two as simple cause and effect,—the Sabbath-keeping and the drunkenness,—though there is doubtless some connection of that sort between the sombre day and the number of reelers on the street. But facts like these should be remembered in comparing the two Sabbath-types^*. The page 80 "working-men" will have recreation, and, if the higher kinds are shut to them, there will only be the more idle men to seek the lower kinds,—the den if not the garden, the saloon if not the concert or the gallery.