THE REPORTER.
"'TIS PLEASANT, THROUGH THE LOOP-HOLES OF RETREAT, TO PEEP AT SUCH A WORLD-- TO SEE THE STIR OF THE GREAT BABEL, AND NOT FEEL THE CROWD."
VOL. II. NO. 37.	WASHINGTON, (PA.) MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5th, 1821.	WHOLE NO. 89.

      MR. EDITOR,

      SIR--The delays which so often attend the execution of my purposes remind me of the words of the poet,

      'Tis now some weeks since I promised you a few strictures on Judge Rush's charge to the grand jury of Luzerne county, on the "institution of the Sabbath." It is of no consequence to offer apologies which only detain me longer from the task I have proposed to myself, I therefore proceed.

      The publication of those numbers of the Judges address in your paper, as you tell us, was at the request of some of the members of the West Middletown association for fines and imprisonment. As they were unable to maintain their cause by their own efforts against the Nos. which I have had the trouble of writing to convince them of their error--they thought it best to call forth the honorable Judge Rush to fight for them, or at least to cover their retreat. Yet, what is not a little remarkable, the Judge does not say a word in their support, or argue the cause of such petty associations--But inasmuch as he descants on the laws of Pennsylvania against vice and immorality, they supposed it best to make their retreat under color of the laws and leave the good natured Judge to shift for himself.

      I have no idea of pronouncing unqualified censures on the Judges address. As a citizen of respectability and as a president of a civil court, he is entitled to respect; and, although I may conceive that there are some defects in his knowledge of the subject on which he writes, I am constrained to respect the benevolence and goodness of intention, that seems to have dictated his remarks--With far the greater part of his observations I heartily concur, but I must beg leave to dissent from some things he has said, from a conviction that they are not accordant with the letter, or spirit of christianity. Many things may appear rational and religious and be highly esteemed amongst men that are not esteemed, nor commended by the author of the christian faith. The whole Bible is a comment upon this.

      In No. I. of the Judges address "on the Institution of the Sabbath" he says many excellent things on the nature and inevitable consequences of vice and immorality, both as they affect this life, and that which is to come. True it is indeed, that, "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."--The Judge unhappily weakens the force of his own remarks by applying them to support a law which is not compatible with pure virtue and pure morality--This I shall attempt to exhibit in the sequel.

      He tells us that one clause of the law on which he comments, passed in the year 1794, "prohibits all wordly employments on Sunday except works of necessity and charity" "and a proviso of the same law authorizes, preparation of necessary food &c. also the sale of the necessaries of life before nine in the morning and after five in the afternoon in our public markets.¹

      My objections to this law are the following--

      1st. Because it is intended to compel all citizens without respect to any conscientious conviction to observe a day in one sense only by abstaining from industrious employment which in some instances only facilitates the commission of crime and greatly encreases those very vices and immoralities which the Judge himself bewails. To instance this I will only mention one fact known to many, viz. that hundreds of men, nay thousands, commit more sin in being compelled to refrain from the daily business of life on this day than they do on any other day of the week. The waggoner, so often fined for driving his team on this day, ninety nine times in every hundred, spends the day worse lying by, than in travelling.

      2d. It tends to oppress the consciences of some who conscientiously observe the seventh and cannot conscientiously observe the first day. Such as Jews and seventh day Baptists.

      3d. The obedience which the law constrains is neither pleasing to God, nor profitable to man. The man who observes the first day merely because the law requires him, performs not that kind of obedience which flows from the heart, and consequently it is with him an unwilling service.

      4th. The law itself is unjust, inasmuch as it is partial, it consults the taste and voluptuousness of the genteelfolks in large cities, by allowing them to go to market, morning and evening to buy such things as may satisfy their craving appetite, while it would fine the poor farmer for saving his harvest, or gathering the labours of the year--a work of much greater importance than buying and selling fresh, oysters, melons, leeks, and onions, or a fresh beef stake, before sermon or even after they return from worship.

      A fifth objection I have to the law, commended by the judge is, that the law itself is on its own principles lame, because it does not secure any thing to the interests of even common religion or morality, because that while it prohibits many from industry allowable on all other days; it allows them to spend the day reading newspapers, writing letters of business, or amusement; talking politics or speculating upon any carnal or temporal topic. This I say it allows because jurisdiction extends not to such things, but merely to overt acts on the highway or in the field.

      These are, with me, insuperable objections to the whole system of civil interposition to sanctify the first day of the week. As the main drift of the judges address was to recommend and enforce the above law, it detracts from the merits of his good observations, and makes them subservient to an injustifiable end. I must here add that I cannot advocate any system of coercion in religion, nor any thing that even looks like it, believing, that every such system is a vain attempt, to substitute a formal and mocked obedience for an honest, sincere and devout regard to the institutes of christianity.--Far be it from my intention, and from my remarks to weaken the attachment of all true christians to the observance of the first day of the week, according to the christian institutes. It is, and it has long been a maxim with me, that he cannot be a christian who does not regard and sanctify the first day of the week to the Lord.

      But it is as absurd, with me, to compel men to pay regard to the first day of the week, who do not acknowledge and feel their obligation to him whose day it is, as to compel men to sit down at the communion table, and pay a mocked regard to the death of Christ. And I must add my conviction, that all those whose regard to it, in any shape, is compulsory, would be better employed in ploughing or reaping; in planting or building than in yielding a forced respect to it.

      It is a fact worthy to be noted, that no prophet nor Apostle, no inspired man in old, or new Testament times, ever dropped a word against Sabbath breakers, amongst any other nation than the Jews. Amongst all the sins that proved the ruin of Sodom and Gomorah, Babylon and Nineveh, Greece and Rome, that of Sabbath prophenation is never mentioned. Nor was it until Constantine married the church and the state, that a civil law was passed requiring from all ranks and degrees of men, a civil respect to this institution. I could here transcribe the first law ever published on the subject, were it necessary for my purpose, and from facts incontrovertable prove, that formality and hypocrisy began from that day to stalk abroad with shameless aspect.

      I have often observed that when men become advocates for any unscriptural and irrational practice in religion, it is to be traced to something fundamentally wrong in their doctrinal views of religion and therefore I fear that the judge in the following remarks too much countenances a system anti-evangelical in its tendency--he says that "nothing but a life of piety and obedience to the laws of Heaven will procure final happiness beyond the grave,"--and, "that meekness, charity and forgiveness are the indispensible conditions of obtaining our own forgiveness"--If such were the Judges views of the ground and condition of a sinners admission into Heaven, it is to me, by no means surprizing, that he should so far mistake the nature of that observance which the christian religion demands to its institutes. And still less strange, that the leading members of the Middletown Club, should wish to promulgate his sentiments.

[The Reporter, 5 February 1821, p. 1.]