Mr. Hatch and Sunday Observance

Your examination of the report I sent you of a meeting in Buffalo, and the resolutions passed thereat, must have been very imperfect, or you would have seen that worship is one of those things to which, in our opinion, Sunday should be devoted. Please to understand that we recognise the propriety of devoting a part of the first day of the week to public worship; but we insist upon it, that it is, in the first place, a popish perversion of the dark ages, a puritan notion of a later day, quite contrary to the practice of the early christians as well as the teaching of the great Protestant Reformers, that the day should be considered as especially holy, and be ENTIRELY devoted to solemn religious exercises, public or private.

Does it follow because I would have the day devoted, in part, to cheerful social recreation, that I would have no service of public worship on that day? Is that a specimen of your logic? Really, you rival the Tribune in the drawing of inferences on this subject! You ask "what will become of the clergy" if these ideas are carried out. In my opinion, they would fare a great deal better than they do now.

It is notorious that most of them are overworked, now, on Sunday, instead of enjoying a day of rest. Hence the lassitude—the "Monday feeling" so common with our clergy. But if it would not be so well for the clergy, it would be better for the people,—and they are in the vast majority,—to spend part of the day in social recreation, as they do a part of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If to benefit a comparatively small number of clergy, it is necessary to pretend that the 4th Commandment is still binding, and that there is Divine or Apostolic authority for the transfer of obligation from the seventh day of the week to the first; and, moreover, that recreation was forbidden to the Jews as well as labor, on Sabbath; and that the early Christians and Protestant Reformers so regarded it;—not a word of which has any foundation in the truth—I think the clergy had better suffer. But as I have said, I anticipate no such results. Statistics will show that church attendance is most general among those who regard the Lord's Day as a religious festival of human appointment to be devoted to recreation, as well as worship.

Therefore, please to retract your charge that I am "inaugurating a movement against Sabbath observance and religious worship."

P. S.—At a meeting on Sabbath Observance held in N. Y., last evening, it was stated that the King of Prussia, at whose invitation and under whose auspices the late meeting of the Evangelical Alliance was held at Berlin, goes to church with his family in the morning, and to the Theatre in the evening. Queen Victoria, the head of the Church of England, it is well known does not scruple to go on Sunday excursions, and yet she is constant at Church. There are no two crowned heads in the world, I believe, in better esteem for their private virtues and public administration, than these two—the Queen of England and the King of Prussia.