And, besides its protective power, legislation has also a strong _negative_ operation. There are barriers which can only be removed by its assistance. At all events, its interposition may at any moment be invoked to stop such a removal. It may impede the extension of Sunday travelling: it may refuse its licence to the multiplication of Sunday amusement: it may refrain from sanctioning the creation of those haunts and rendezvous of public attraction which make just the difference oftentimes between neglect and contempt, between disregard and defiance, between indifference and desecration. It is one thing to know that a multitude of individuals, however numerous, fail to honour the day; another, to parade before the eyes of the world the legalization of that failure. In what manner then do these remarks bear upon the particular subject now before us; the design (as it is commonly understood) of opening to the Public during certain hours of the Sunday some portions of the Crystal Palace? I have no sympathy with an outcry founded in whole or in part upon what appears to me to be an untenable notion of the nature of our Christian Sunday. And I confess that I could forgive a Statesman who should receive on the present occasion with deep suspicion the remonstrances of men who but three years ago fostered and aggravated the same outcry on a plea which the slightest examination would have shown to be fallacious. Those who have lent themselves in former instances to swell the chorus of an ignorant and fanatical clamour, have no claim to attention now but that with which the actual merits of their case may furnish them. But the two occasions are, as I believe, widely different. The contrast is unimportant: I will come at once to the present. And let me admit, once for all, that it is with things _as they are_ that we have to do; not with things as they _might_ exist in a totally opposite condition. We must take the state of the poor man as it is, and the state of Sunday observance as it is. We might _wish_ indeed that both were widely different. We might form to ourselves the picture of a poor man’s Sunday, such as in rare instances we have seen it: the clean though humble dwelling, the early prayer of the household, the open Bible, the walk to Church, the one comfortable meal of the week, the holy and loving converse of the evening, the prayer and the blessing with which the day ended as it began. And we might say, and say with truth, that, for a family thus resting in holy union throughout its weekly festival of Christian devotion and thankfulness, no change could come that were not for the worse. No want is here felt of anything which God has not given: enough for that happy home is the change which Sunday has brought with it over the aspect of every familiar object; the rest from labour, enjoyed with those dearest on earth, in the remembrance of One loved above all—this is all that they ask—more would destroy it.