Many other considerations there are, tending to make us view the present movement with deep dismay. We fear it cannot bode good to the cause of God and his truth, when Herod and Pilate are made friends; when the Romanist and the Neologian are urging the same forms of Sabbath observance; when “Gebal and Ammon and Amalek,”—the man of science, the man of pleasure, and the man of scrip and shares,—are all intent on the same scheme of social amelioration. The fear is not unnatural with us that the junction-point of this strange confederacy will be found, not in any result which they wish to _achieve_, so much as in some existing influence which it is their common desire to _destroy_,—namely, the influence of that pure and undefiled religion which teaches that science must bow to Scripture, that covetousness is only another name for idolatry, and that the man who allows himself in vicious or forbidden pleasures shall not have any “inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” We can only regard such united attempt as the first instalment of a yet more extended plan, by which we are to become assimilated to the profane usages of the Continent, until every place of public amusement or resort, from the national Museum to the itinerant puppet-show, shall throw open their doors to any Sabbath wanderer, who may desire, under cover of law, to do despite to God’s holy day. The constant plea put forth for these Sabbath recreations, that something must be done towards elevating the moral and intellectual tastes of our people, is not tenable for an instant. For, admitting the necessity, why should not the time required for it be taken from one of the _six_ days now appropriated to the world, rather than from the one only day which we now set apart for God? But the whole is in true keeping with Infidel patriotism. It looks only on its own things. It spares itself. And then, when affecting a desire to redeem time for the improvement of the poor, like him who in the parable spared to take of his own flock and his own herd, it will not, by an hour, anticipate the closing of the factory, but demands that half the time be taken away from the few hours that are now given to the church. {27}