The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1859-09-18
The Jewish Sabbath and the Christian
Sunday.

The Jewish Sabbath and the Christian
Sunday.
The Sunday question continues to excite
great interest both among the people and the
press. 1t is question in which the whole
community is concerned, and therefore COM
| mands universal attention.
The meeting in the Bowery on Tuesday last
has put the fanatical papers in Mysteries, and
set the hypocritical Pharisaical journals to the
publication of platitudes about inidelity i'm
morality, and the first French Revolution. To
all who understand the subject these lucubra-
tons are highly amusing for the ignorance
they display and for the violence of passion,
and which is an infallble symptom of the weak
ness of their arguments.
On another page we publish three interesting
articles of very different character; they are
calm, well reasoned and full of facts. The two
| first from the Nurchman of this city, the or
gan of the Episcopal church, give the Episco-
palian view of the question contrastcd with the
Puritanical; and the last, from the organ of
the Archbishop of Cincinnati, presents the
Catholic view Of ii. With these views our own
opinions substantially coincide; and it will be
seen that what we have written from time to
| time on the subject is borne out in remark
able manner by the articles which we extract
| from our contemporaries.
The positions We established were, that the
Jewish Sabbath was abrogated, (and it is in
deed abrogated,' says the writer in the Church
mani; that there is not only no authority in
the New Testament for its continuance, but
the contrary; that Sunday is an ordinance of
the Catholic church. like her other holidays, and
herauthority is the only warrant we have for OBJ
serving it: that the festival has been borrowed
from that church by the Puritans in common with
other Protestants, but thatits mode ofobservance
has been changed by the Puritans alone into
dismal, gloomy, Jewish Sabbath more like a
fast than feast day, and that the Apostles and
the early Christians rejected that idea Of it.
The Protestant Reformers, too, who separated
from the Catholic church on other grounds,
agreed with it in this. And everywhere else
in Christendom but in England, Scotland and the
United States, Sunday is held as joyous festival.
like Christmas or our Thanksgiving day. This
:.c Ir.,itt
Therefore, says Lyman Coleman, in his Ancient
Christianity Exemplifed England, Scotland
and America, and they only, of all the nations
of Christendom, enjoy Christian Sabbath"
So that, according to the quadrilateral journal
befogged in ''the elbows of the Mincio,' and
wet blanket Of Wall street whose piety run
mad will be the death of it, the Episcopalians
ol;o q tIa
other American Christians, a very large majority
of the Episcopalians of England (and they are
the majority of the people, the Catholics of that
country, the Christians of France, Italy, Ger
many and all the rest of Christendom, are inf
dels; and journal in this country which agrees
with them, and nearly the whole Christian
world, is accused of infdelity and Of an at
tempt to break down the barriers of morality
and social order.
Every reader of the HERALD knows that it
has always denounced infdelity as strongly as
it has fanaticism in religion; that it has been
ever the consistent advocate of law and order
and the rights of property, and the sacred OBJ
legation Of contracts, in opposition alike to
those party journals which have demoralized
politics and established reign of rowdyism
and terror on the ruins of law and order; to
those journals which call property robbery,
and those which, advocating the violation of
the compact made between the slave States
and the free when the constitution was
adopted, proclaim Ia higher law than
the Bible and the fundamental law of the
land, and to enforce it invoke an eirrepressible
conflict" between the North and the South
which will deluge the country with human
| blood.
Or this latter class is the journal which charges
the HERALD with "boldly arrayng itself against
all that is sacred in religion and pure in morals,
and striking at the very existence ofsocial order
and the security of life and property" One
Of the social crimes urged by this hypocritical
journal against the HERALD is, that it is published
not only on the other six days of the week, but
also on Sunday. Now it is hardly necessary
to tell the reader that the SUNDAY HERALD is
prepared on Saturday, whereas the Monday issue
of the Wall street journal is prepared on Sum
day, and its editors, reporters and printers all
work on that day, in direct violation of the kind
Of Sunday observance for which it contends
Could the impudcnce Of hypocrisy and the
force Of cant further go?
Our quadrilateral contemporary, on the con-
trary, abandons the religious idea of Sunday
laws, and contends that they have only civil
aspect, and are for the temporal good Of the
people. If that be the case, and that the old
Puritan leaven is not working in his stomach,
why does he object to Sunday recreations and
Sunday amusements, which are certainly for
Che peoples good land why call those inf
dels" who are seeking to remove the Sunday
restrictions on the statute book, one of which
gives power to the police to close all places of
amusement in tho ~ xyh;la ,ncoh;y,sto