There is yet another point, which has left on your mind, as on that of others, an unfavourable impression. The attendance of the additional Clerks on Sunday in the London Post Office is voluntary. In other words, a man whose conscience forbids him to attend on the Sunday shall not forfeit his situation by refusal. Does this imply, on the part of the Government, any mis-giving as to the lawfulness of the duties proposed? It merely recognizes the possibility of such scruples, and extends to them the amplest toleration. That there _are_ men who would think such attendance wrong, is a matter of fact: the Government tolerates, though it does not share, the opinion, and would prevent its operating harshly upon the fortunes of the conscientious recusant. How loud an outcry, from the very same quarters, would have followed a system of _compulsion_, may be inferred from the strange contradiction which “closes a period” in the “Reply.” “He must be a very prejudiced man who calls the poor clerk a voluntary agent in the matter, when he is enticed by a bribe, which his small salary makes an irresistible temptation, or compelled by the fear of the loss of his only means of subsistence.” {28} “The poor clerk” is not threatened with the loss of his subsistence: that he is not, was urged just now against the authors of the measure as a proof of conscious guilt or weakness. But is it not, you ask, too strong a temptation to a man of infirm religious principles, to offer him a reward for Sunday labour? Can you expect him to resist the “bribe?” And if afterwards this voluntary labour should lie heavily on his conscience, how could you justify to yourself your own share in his transgression? Now, if the act proposed be in itself, and of necessity, a sin; if no consideration of motives or circumstances can justify the occupation of any portion of the Sunday in the most urgent of worldly concerns; he, certainly, is deeply guilty, who proposes it, even with an alternative, to the choice of his neighbour. But, if this be one of those questions on which God’s Word leaves scope, within certain limits, for the exercise of an individual judgment; if, in reducing to practical detail the admitted duty of a religious observance of the Sunday, one man may conscientiously approve what another no less conscientiously condemns, and it remains only that “every man be fully persuaded in his own mind;” then the demand made by this Regulation upon the candour and courage of those to whom it offers the work and the wages, is no greater than that which must daily be encountered by all who labour for their own bread, and would do so in the fear of God. To none does it propose, as the Author of the Reply would lead us to imagine, the surrender of religious instruction and worship, the abandonment of all opportunity of serious meditation, or the devotion of the Lord’s Day to the service of a “godless or thoughtless multitude.” {29a} On the