their aversion to alter the laws;-with others, under their compassion for the labouring poor; with others still, under their apprehensions of all undue political interference with religion;-while, alas! there is too much reason to fear, that there is, with a large proportion of all the three classes, a listless unconcern about the whole matter, or a desire to take and to give indulgence, keeping even existing statutes in abeyance, and acting under their convenient connivance.

It is not my business to dictate to the legislature, or to enter into legal views of the case, and propose suitable and efficient enactments. To this I pretend not to be competent. My sole object is, to ascertain correct principles.

We, in the northern part of the island, are as yet happily free from the crying evils, prolific of so many others, of public markets, and open shops, and stalls and hawkers in our frequented streets, and Sunday travelling, by coach and steam, and the vending of Sunday newspapers, and other sources of corruption to public morals, which are either notorious infractions of existing statutes, or tolerated inconsistencies with them. These evils have

There are, if I mistake not, thirteen Sunday newspapers published in London, of which upwards of 40,000 copies are openly sold, on that day, in 300 shops! It is needless to say, that some of these papers derive their zest to the public mind, from their containing not merely the ordinary news of the day, but a collection of caricature and buffoonery, of all the varieties of sporting intelligence, from the turf, and the ring, and the cock-pit, of anecdotes (the more laughable the better) of high and low, of fashionable and vulgar life, mixed up, more openly or more artfully, with the poison of infidelity and irreligion, in forms adapted to all capacities and all characters. And this is SUNDAY READING!

risen to an enormous amount of public annoyance, and of moral mischief, in the south. And, alas! there is an irreligious spirit prevalent, which treats with indifference and scorn every lamentation over the wrong, and every serious proposal of amelioration ;—a spirit which, it is to be feared, has, in no small degree, infected our legislative assemblies themselves, and which gives to the offenders a disdainful sense of security, and enables them to treat with a careless defiance, or a contemptuous leer, such as would remind them of the laws, and intimidate them into submission. And, indeed, with regard to not a few of the protecting penalties, being of ancient enactment, they have, in our times, become a mere mockery, and might as well have no existence.

I must repeat, that the enactments, for which I plead, are such as regard, solely, the secular ends of the Sabbath, in which light alone it can be a law of man, and enforced by human penalties. And, in this point of view, there is perhaps quite as much, if not even more, of difficulty, in regard to the amusements, than in regard to the labour and the merchandise of the day. It was a singular anomaly in Christian legislation (so called by a miserable misnomer) when, in the century before last, the celebrated "BOOK OF SPORTS" was published, under the high sanction of royal and episcopal recommendation and authority, specifying and prescribing the amusements in which the good people of England might lawfully indulge on the Lord's day. The wisdom of the first James suggested the scheme, and the piety of the first Charles had the credit of reviving it. As it was dictated by aversion to puritanism, whose "most uncourtly strictness" suited not

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the royal taste, its indulgences were sufficiently liberal, including, by express mention, “ dancing, archery, leaping, vaulting, May-games, Whitsun-ales, and morris dances ! The royal mandate was laid upon all ministers, to read this book of sports to their congregations, and so to give it their express or tacit sanction; and, if the order was dis obeyed, the consequence, to the conscientious culprit, was prosecution, suspension, and imprisonment! The pretext for this plenary indulgence to the desecration of the Sabbath, (for, indeed, it was little better,) was the prevention of excess, of excess, in the two opposite extremes, of puritanical dulness, and unrestricted licentiousness. How it was likely to operate upon the public mind and character, I leave you to judge. Had it been meant to devise a method for effectually obliterating all impressions of the sacredness of the day, and for erasing the lessons designed to be communicated by the reading and preaching of the word, one better adapted to the purpose could not well be imagined. You may form to yourselves some estimate of the effect produced by it, from the following simple but graphic description, from the pen of the justly eminent Richard Baxter: cannot forget," says he," that in my youth, in those late times, when we lost the labours of some of our godly teachers, for not reading publicly the Book of Sports, and dancing on the Lord's day, one of my father's own tenants was the town-piper, hired by the year, (for many years together,) and the placed of the dancing assembly was not a hundred yards from our door. We could not, on the Lord's day, either read a chapter, or pray, or sing a psalm, or catechize or instruct a servant, but with the noise of the pipe and tabour, and the shout

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ings in the streets, continually in our ears. Even among a tractable people, we were the common scorn of all the rabble in the streets, and were called puritans, precisians, and hypocrites, because we rather chose to read the Scriptures, than to do as they did; though there was no savours of non-conformity in our family. And when the people, by the book, were allowed to play and dance out of public service-time, they could so hardly break off their sports, that› many a time, the reader was fain to stay till, the piper and players would give over. Sometimes the morris-dancers would come into the church in all, their linen, and scarfs, and antic dresses, with morris-bells jing ling sat their legs; and as soon as common prayer was read, did haste out presently to their play again. I 19 Greatly as the Sabbath is still neglected or profaned among us," says the late lamented Mr. Orme, from whose life of Baxter these sentences are quoted, it ought to afford sincere satisfaction, that such scenes as the above could not now be transacted in any part of Eng land and still less, I rejoice to add, in any part of Scotland,++What shall we say, then, of an eminent prelate, who lived a century later, when he ventures to affirm on such a subject" The present humour of the common people leads, perhaps, more to a profanation of the festival, than to a superstitious rigour in the observance of it. But in the attempt to reform, we shall do wisely to remember, that the thanks for this are chiefly due to the base spirit of puritanical hypocrisy, which, in the last century, opposed and defeated the wise attempts of government to regulate the recreations of the day by authority, and prevente the excesses which have actually taken place by a

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rational indulgence!"It is upon the very same principle that the haunts of impurity have in some countries been legalized, and licensed, and subjected to rules of police, and so, with certain prudential restrictions, taken under public patronage; and the same kind of plea has been urged in vindication of the practice.

I am not sure that any law can be framed respecting amusements on the Sabbath, except upon the general principle, that no man, in his mode of spending the day, shall be a disturbance and annoyance to others. This would lead to the interdiction and suppression of a large proportion, if not of all sports and pastimes of an open and public nature. With regard to what is private, it is impossible that laws can interfere: and, were it possible, it would be beyond their legitimate province. Even as to what is public, the principle can only be laid down generally, leaving room for questions not so much of moral as of legal casuistry; and for special cases, in behalf of which pleas of exception might be put in, as being free of the charge of outward disturbance or annoyance to any one. I say, outward disturbance or annoyance: for I am at present speaking of human laws; and, were we to take into our definition of disturbance and annoyance, the offence and grief given to the moral and religious feelings of the better part of the community, we should, I apprehend, get beyond the limits of such legislation; inasmuch as nothing can divest the pious bosom of this offence and grief, but the true spiritual observance of the day;-which, of course, is what no law of man can enact, or, by enacting, produce.-On this subject, as on a number of others, there is little that can be done in the way of legal statute: