Was this not a proof of what the world did not know, the practical business-like tact, no less than the deep-founded principle, of this lamented man? When the Lord’s day railway traffic was first sanctioned in England, good men, it has been seen, ran away from the field, and left it in the hands, and delivered it over to the tender mercies of speculators, who sought with greed, and talked with complacency, of the gains in prospect when “Sunday traffic should be fully developed.” The churches also, and the religious press, complimented the pietistic self-denial of those estimable persons who sold out their stock, that the enemy might retain an uncontroverted possession of the field; and to this hour the Lord’s-day Society remains paralysed, {10} and the English Sabbath railway cause prostrated, through the melancholy panic which actuated this flight. Not so the stout judgment of him who, strong in his piety, gentle in his affections, and earnest in his zeal, but clear in discernment and practised in business, at once saw that so long as the constitution of the railway companies remained sound, and only their voluntary actings were vicious, it was not merely lawful, but praiseworthy, to join them for the purpose of bringing their impure _actings_ into accordance with their pure _principle_; and it was felt that the proposed stockholding afforded a legitimate and excellent opportunity, as well as a right and privilege, to bring before all stockholders the highest principles of moral and religious law, in their bearing on a question of traffic which affects, more or less, all trading, and is as much forced on a company of coblers or coal-heavers as on a company of railway coach-owners; viz. that of determining whether they shall pursue or abstain from traffic on the Lord’s-day—a question and a discussion affording direct opportunity and lawful right, by moral suasion, to influence the hitherto unreflecting or hostile to adopt the course of truth and soberness. And if, in so doing, honourable gentlemen did convert the half-yearly railway meetings into capitally reported Sabbath meetings, with the immense superiority of having a practical question to discuss, and to discuss most religiously, which interests even worldly men, instead of being limited, as in the others, to the grave exposition of things general, abstract, and clerical, though certainly most savoury, doctrinal, and eternally interesting—this was not only not the fault of the Sabbatarians, but it was a mighty benefit impressed on their policy by the nature and necessity of things, or rather by the very will of God himself. {11}