I have thus far followed the guidance of the Author of the Reply into a field which I still maintain to be foreign to the subject. I owe it to myself, and to the office with which I am entrusted, to leave no room for doubt as to my opinions on so serious a question of duty, even at the risk of embarrassing for the moment a discussion which lies properly in a narrower compass. But the concession, so far as I am concerned, shall end here. I assumed, throughout my Letter, that the national observance of the Sunday is a solemn and sacred duty. But we may surely be allowed to discuss the objects and probable results of a particular change in the working of the London Post Office, without obtruding upon our readers the enquiry whether the Lord’s Day is identical with the Jewish Sabbath, whether the sanctity of the Christian Sunday is derived from the Law or from the Gospel, from “the letter which killeth” or “the spirit that giveth life.” If indeed I were one of those who believe every enactment of the Mosaic Sabbath to be of rigid and perpetual authority, and who yet do and exact on that day, without scruple or remorse, acts which, if so, are worthy of death; or if, while admitting the lawfulness, on that day, for an individual or for a family, of works neither of mercy, strictly speaking, nor of necessity, but only of _extreme convenience_, (and what more can be said in defence of many of those domestic arrangements with which, I imagine, even the Author of the Reply, even on the Sunday, can scarcely dispense?) I yet denied the possibility of a _nations_ having any such household duties as even the arrival of the Lord’s Day must rather modify than supersede; if I regarded it as a plain and obvious sin for a nation, under any circumstances, to suffer any one of its officers to do any portion of his common work on its holy day; if, in short, I regarded the question as thus foreclosed, by a plain and unequivocal revelation of the Divine will, excluding the consideration of motives, of circumstances, of consequences, altogether;—then certainly, sharing my opponent’s principles, I might have used, with more or less of his severity, something at least of his language; though, even then, I trust I might have possessed sufficient discernment to distinguish between a question of principle, and a question of detail; sufficient respect for the understandings, and regard for the consistency, of my neighbours, to have invited them to a protest rather against the permission of any Sunday work in any Post Office, than against a particular adjustment of that burden to which some had always been subjected.