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316 way. When they come home to England they will find their Saturday to fall upon our Sunday, and they may thenceforth continue to observe their Saturday-Sabbath on the same day with us!"

Large and liberal minds were drawn into this Sabbatarian conflict, but they were not the majority. Between the booming of the bigger guns we have an incessant clatter of small-arms. We ought not to judge superior men without reference to the spirit of their age. This is an influence from which they can not escape, and so far as it extenuates their errors it ought to be pleaded in their favor. Even the atrocities of the individual excite less abhorrence when they are seen to be the outgrowth of his time. But the most fatal error that could be committed by the leaders of religious thought is the attempt to force into their own age conceptions which have lived their life, and come to their natural end, in preceding ages. History is the record of a vast experimental investigation—of a search by man after the best conditions of existence. The Puritan attempt was a grand experiment. It had to be made. Sooner or later the question must have forced itself upon earnest believers possessed of power, Is it not possible to rule the world in accordance with the wishes of God as revealed in the Bible? Is it not possible to make human life the copy of a divine pattern? The question could only have occurred in the first instance to the more exalted minds. But, instead of working upon the inner forces and convictions of men, legislation presented itself as a speedier way to the attainment of the desired end. To legislation, therefore, the Puritans resorted. Instead of guiding, they repressed, and thus pitted themselves against the unconquerable impulses of human nature. Believing that nature to be depraved, they felt themselves logically warranted in putting it in irons. But they failed; and their failure ought to be a warning to their successors.

Another error, of a far graver character than that just noticed, may receive a passing mention here. At the time when the Sabbath controversy was hottest, and the arm of the law enforcing the claims of the Sabbath strongest and most unsparing, another subject profoundly stirred the religious mind of Scotland. A grave and serious nation, believing intensely in its Bible, found therein recorded the edicts of the Almighty against witches, wizards, and familiar spirits, and were taught by their clergy that such edicts still held good. The same belief had overspread the rest of Christendom, but in Scotland it was intensified by the rule of Puritanism and the natural earnestness of the people. I have given you a sample of the devilish cruelties practiced on the Christians at Smyrna. These tortures were far less shocking than those inflicted upon witches in Scotland. I say less shocking, because the victims at Smyrna courted martyrdom. They counted the sufferings of this present time as not worthy to be compared with the glory to be revealed; while the sufferers for witchcraft, in the midst of all their agonies, felt themselves God-forsaken, and