to the uses of man, while the puritanical Sunday, which represses recreations and stifles worldly enjoyments, is resisted and repudiated. The institution in its theological aspects is, therefore, destitute of any authoritative religious sanction. But, after centuries of contest between liberality and intolerance, the issue is still the same. As a day of rest from labor, Sunday is objected to by but few; and to the slave and the convict, and the millions of toil-worn operatives in factory, mine, and field, who earn their subsistence by the sweat of the brow, it is indeed a precious boon. To the multitudes doomed to a life of brutalized drudgery in barbaric times, it came as a blessed relief; and it is, perhaps, scarcely less necessary when the pressures of enterprise and competition would wear men out if no check was interposed. But the sour and gloomy Sunday of religious asceticism—the austere Sabbath of the sanctimonious Pharisee—requires to be resisted now as much as it was resisted by the founder of Christianity himself. In regard to the strict observance of Sunday, men have undoubtedly a right to do as they please under our guarantees of religious liberty; but they have no right to force their views upon others by perverting the legal day of rest to assumed religious objects, and by making it a hinderance to enjoyment and improvement on the part of those who desire so to employ it, and who are not to be judged by others in their manner of doing it.
It is objected to the opening of the exhibition on Sunday that it would involve the labor of many in attending to its operations, running trains, etc. But even the superstitious Jews had sense enough to interpret the fourth commandment as allowing works of necessity. A certain amount of Sunday labor is everywhere recognized as unavoidable, and as long as cooking, the running of Sunday cars and carriages, police surveillance, and the distribution of the mails, are carried on in Philadelphia under Pennsylvania laws, the objection to opening the exhibition because it would violate the law against Sunday labor is futile.
But we insist upon keeping the argument upon its highest grounds. We showed at the outset that the character and influence of such an exhibition are not only in the highest degree moral and salutary, but are also essentially religious; its opening every day of the week is therefore defensible on strictly religious grounds. We have furthermore shown that the religious reasons offered, for shutting it up on Sunday, are baseless. The considerations urged for closing are hence exactly those which require it to be free of access to the public—in other words, religion requires the opening. If it be alleged that the people would not see these higher meanings of the objects displayed, that only shows the defects of their religious training; and that there is all the more need of insisting upon this higher office of the exhibition. And if they are thus insensible to the moral and religious significance of so grand a collection of the noblest and most perfect products of human thought and skill, what more proper than to point out to them the elevated lessons that they teach? And if, instead of demanding that the exhibition shall be suppressed one day in the week, as if it were a public nuisance, the committees who have taken so deep an interest in the matter had asked the commissioners to arrange for religious services in one of the great halls, and to provide for discourses designed to bring out the higher instructiveness of the occasion and the demonstration, we think that they would have much better subserved the interests of true religion. The religious lesson that the commissioners have now lent themselves to inculcate is that people shut out from the Centennial buildings shall go to other buildings to think upon God; and that, therefore, the Centen-
