The Sun. — 1844-03-04 (London, England)

COUNCIL.--On Saturday afternoon summonses were issued to the Cabinet Ministers to attend a Privy Council this afternoon, at Buckingham Palace. The time appointed for the Council is a quarter before three -o'cloc , and most of the Ministers are expected to be present.  " At the last meeting of the Edinburgh and Glas gow Railway Company," says a Scotch paper, " Sir ANDREW AGNEW moved as an amendment to the approval of the Report, that the Sunday trains be discontinued ; at the same time he presented memorials against their continuance from the Free Church Presbyteries of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The vote being taken, the Report was approved of by a majority of the shareholders present, fifteen voting for it and nine for Sir ANDREW AGNEW'S amendment—the majority represented three hundred and fifty-five votes, the minority forty-six. Five of the minority held only one share each." Poor Sir ANDREW AGNEW 1 He seems doomed to perpetual discomfiture—predestined to be the very hero of defeat. Scotland, like England, will have nothing to do with his panaceas for piety, but repudiates both him and them with equal pertinacity. On either side the Tweed he makes a stir only to be laughed at. The recent defeat of his amendment at the meeting of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Company which— as will be seen by the above paragraph—was a crushing one, will, we trust, teach him a useful lesson of discretion whereof he stands much in need ; and convince him that it is only " labour lost" to attempt to make head against the common sense and right feeling of a community. Were the interests of true religion involved in:such puritanical restrictions as this grim Baronet has now, for a long term of years, been assiduously endeavouring to impose on the Sabbath recreations of the people, we should not dream for an instant of objecting to them ; but religion has nothing to do with the matter; the question is one of pure Pharisaical cant—of cant unleavened with the slightest admixture of toleration or common sense. Were it possible that Sir ANDREW AGNEw and the double-distilled Saints whathink with him, could ever succeed in their efforts to propagate fanaticism among the people, they would do more public mischief, both in a moral and religious sense, than whole centuries of enlightened legislation could repair. For let no one imagine that a longfaced puritanical community must necessarily be a moral and devout one. The records of our own history show that the reverse is the fact, for never were there greater outrages committed than during the reign of the Saints in England, when robberies, and even murders, were continually perpetrated, under the pretext of religion, by Millenarians and Fifth Monarchy-men, who yet would have shuddered at the idea of missing attendance at a conventicle twice or thrice a day, and fancied themselves absolved from all crimes so long as they held fast by the practice of singing psalms and hymns in the key of a Tower-gun. Look, too, at the career of the Munster Anabaptists—men who cried down all innocent amusements as impious—who were strict to a degree in the performance of all external religious duties, yet who scrupled not to commit the most heinous excesses ! Generally speaking, a fanatical community must of necessity be a hypocritical one, and the day, we trust, is far distant when cant and hypocrisy shall find favour in the eyes of the major portion of the people. Stringert religious restrictions, such as those which the grim-visaged Atow wites would fain impose upon us, invariably foster the very evil which lit is their object to check. As they commence by making men hypocrites, so, in nine cases out of ten, they end by making them infidels.