interfered with? To justify this position the demonstration of the success of Sabbatarianism must be complete. Is it so? Are we so much better than other nations who have neglected to adopt our rules, that we can point to the working of these rules in the past as a conclusive reason for maintaining them immovable in the future? The answer must be, No. My Sabbatarian friends, you have no ground to stand upon. I say friends, for I would far rather have you as friends than as enemies—far rather see you converted than annihilated. You possess a strength and earnestness with which the world can not dispense; but, to be productive of anything permanently good, that strength and earnestness must build upon the sure foundation of human nature. This is that law of the universe spoken of so frequently by your illustrious countryman, Mr. Carlyle, to quarrel with which is to provoke and precipitate ruin. Join with us, then, in our endeavors to turn our Sundays to better account. Back with your support the moderate and considerate demands of the Sunday Society, which scrupulously avoids interfering with the hours devoted by common consent to public worship. Offer the museum, the picture-gallery, and the public garden as competitors to the public-house. By so doing you will fall in with the spirit of your time, and row with, instead of against, the resistless current along which man is borne to his destiny.
Most of you here are Liberals; perhaps Radicals, perhaps even Democrats or Republicans. I am a Conservative. The first requisite of true conservatism is foresight. Humanity grows, and foresight secures room for future expansion. In your walks in the country you sometimes see a wall built round a growing tree. So much the worse for the wall, which is sure to be rent and ruined by the energy which' it opposes. We have here represented not a true, but a false and ignorant conservatism. The real conservative looks ahead and prepares for the inevitable. He forestalls revolution by securing, in due time, sufficient amplitude for the national vibrations. He is a wrongheaded statesman who imposes his notions, however right in the abstract, on a nation unprepared for them. He is no statesman at all who, without seeking to interpret and guide it in advance, merely waits for the more or less coarse expression of the popular will, and then constitutes himself its vehicle. Untimeliness is sure to be the characteristic of the work of such a statesman. In virtue of the position which he occupies, his knowledge and insight ought to be in advance of the public knowledge and insight; and his action, in like degree, ought to precede and inform public action. This is what I want my Sabbatarian friends to bear in mind. If they look abroad from the vantage-ground which they occupy, they can hardly fail to discern that the intellect of this country is gradually ranging itself upon our side. Statesmen, clergymen, philosophers, and moralists are joining our standard. Whether, therefore, those to whom I appeal hear, or whether they forbear, we are sure to unlock, for the public
