The Sun.
London, England, 1849-09-28 00:00:00

ehtninA AUL

LONDON, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1849.

The so-called Religionists are at it again ! Again
are our ears stunned with the cries of " Sabbath

Desecration !" Of all classes certainly in the United
Kingdom these gentlemen are the most thin-
skinned and sensitive. Call a mackerel in the streets,
and they are all but fainting. Let the potboy go his
rounds precociously, say by two minutes, rattling his
cans against the area railings, and summoning the
cook with his feline cry of " Be-er t" and they are
very nearly in a state of asphyxia. Let an ungodly
engine come wheezing up to any one of the platforms
en the Scottish Central Railway on a Sunday, and
they are ready to expire, or explode, or give some
other alarming indication of their astonishment. It
is recorded of EBENEZER SCROOGE that when he saw
the two back buttons of his coat through the
transparent ghost of JACOB MARLEY, he then
recognized for the first time how true the
neighbours had been when they declared of his
deceased partner that he had no bowels. We require
no such evidence from an apparition to remove any
incredulity as to the same observation applied to
these sanctimonious Sabbatarians. After their humane
and magnanimous proceeding towards her Grace the
Duchess of SUTHERLAND it would be rather difficult
to view such a remark when directed towards them
as in any degree libellous. We have learnt by a
bitter experience that although they might, and
would unquestionably extricate, on any day out of
the seven, the ox who had fallen into the pit for Om
aahe of their pockets, they would be disposed to
bellow out :pretty loudly against whosoever might
presume to cull the ripe corn•ears in harvest time,
at any hour between sundown on Saturday and
sunrise on Monday. For all that they would do
to remove the possibility of such calamities—the ,
aged parent might breathe his last without seeing his
children, the victims of sudden disease might remain
unaided by the skill of a physician, the merchant
might he ruined, because a train should not run, a
hack should not be saddled, a letter should not be
posted at certain weekly intervals. Manifestly these
persons pray according to a punctilio. They may
disclaim any sympathy with the " mummeries" of
this or that order of the priesthood, but it is never-
theless sufficiently clear that they are themselves im-
measurably more stringent sticklers for the forms of
worship and the ceremonies of morality. They dream of
escaping condemnation by a strict attention to the
rubric—they dream of going to heaven by the card,
Of a truth these men must be none other than the
lineal descendants of those foolish Galatians whom
Saint PAUL reprimanded for their excessive attention
to rules, days, and seasons. They would love GOD
according to the Rule of Three. They would work
out their salvation as they would the veriest sum in
arithmetic—the laws of the Kirk the " Divisor" and
everlasting felicity the "Quotient." It may be that
for inasmuch as we cannot remain silent when
Cant becomes thus rampant, and when Humbug
assumes a tone so exquisitely and intolerably domi-
neering, it may be that we, for protesting thus
distinctly and emphatically against the dictum of
111 pocrisy, shall fall under their reprobation as among
the outcast and the reprobate. As EPHRAM SMOOTH,
in the Comedy, avers to Lady AMARANTH, "Verily, I
was buffetted by SATAN i❑ the form of a young
maiden ;" these EPHRAM SMOOTHS of society may ex •
claim that verily they were buffetted by BEELZEBUB in
the guise of a carnal•minded and heathen journalist.
We care not—but must speak, and speak plainly too,
for our whole soul abhors this miserable mockery of
religion, this pestilent assumption of sanctity,
this contemptible and pitiable masquerade of
holiness. Away with it ! or we shall witness
here, as elsew here, the excessive recoil produced by
the principle of reaction. If these Sabbatarian folks
be permitted to rush into one extreme, the rest of the
community may be driven into the other, out of the
sentiment of sheer opposition. Loving and reve-
rencing goodness as we do from the innermost core
of our nature, we are compelleda by the very depth
of that devotion, to protest against this wretched
affectation of sanctity—this atrabilious pretence of
sobriety—this cynical sham of all that is pure, and
beautiful, and divine in Christianity.

Recent improvements in many of the venerable
country edifices dedicated to the service of the Omni-
potent GOD have brought to light proofs of
an ignorance, a pig-headedness, a stupidity,
and a barbarism in some intermediate generation of
our ancestors, such:as it would be found impossible to
exceed or even parallel elsewhere, we believe, even in
the most benighted community. Exquisite tesselated
pavements have been found to have at some period or
other been caked over with earthen tiles; the
sculptured shafts of marble pillars to have been
covered with the commonest plaster; and very lately
in one of the village churches of England it was dis-
covered that the rich oak pews and reading-desks had
been whitewashed ? Now, morally these Sabbatarians
are to us as these tiling;plastering, and whitewashing
dolts were actually ; the hiders of all
that is most lovely, attractive and effi-
cacious in the ordonations of religion. We feel
towards them (only in an infinitely greater degree)
as we have always felt towards that miseral ignoramus
who had SELICSPERE'S bust at Stratford-on-Avon a
bust originally giving the colour of his eyes, the hue
of his hair and beard, and the bloom of life upon his
countenance—scraped, or washed, or treated in some
other equally horrible and sacrilegious manner. Pre-
cisely in this way, only to an intensity multiplied in
proportion to the degree in which our reverence fog,
morality exceeds our homage for SHAESPERE, do
wt
feel towards these miserable little emmets of Sabba-
tarians.

They have been putting themselves out of the way
vastly during the last day or two. And all about
soma cock-and-a-bull story respecting a reported