This is the true secret of much serious opposition. The national character of this act is felt by many to be the chief objection to it. Now let us understand what the word “national” implies. There is, no doubt, a very true sense in which a Government represents a nation. But it may represent truly or falsely; if falsely, does God regard it as the representative of the national mind and will? If the nation is bent on not keeping the Sabbath in the highest manner, would the dictum of the Government against all other ways of spending it, constitute a national Sabbath observance? All that we could gain in that case would be an appearance—an appearance how awfully contradicted in Clerkenwell, Rag-fair, Lambeth, Chelsea, Greenwich, and in every place of dense population or public resort. And does God care for this appearance? Is it a cloak that hides any thing from his eye? Think you, that it seems to Him a thing for the sake of which it is worth while to sacrifice one instrument which may help man out of the pit of brutal degradation which the Sabbaths of this metropolis disclose to us, yawning in the very heart of the wisest, the greatest, the richest, the most godly city in the world? Many remember fondly what Sabbaths once were, and willingly shut their eyes to the change. In spite of the decent appearance of our streets—and God forbid that we should ever lose it!—the reality is too decisively the other way, for us to hope that a Government Act can give to us a character before man or before God. The national thought and feeling utters itself every year more loudly. It will not help us, while the fire is raging, to batten down the hatches, and step the deck as trimly as if the cry of alarm had never been heard. We may shut the Crystal Palace and be no nearer a national Sabbath keeping, nay, farther from it,—as plagues pent up in the kilns of their own corruption but taint the air more widely, and cover with their black shadow a broader surface of the land. Some fear that the act of the Legislature will add a sanction to Sabbath breaking by which many will be emboldened. Alas! the balance is not so tremulous that the weight of Government in either scale will make it kick the beam. It is to be feared that many will frequent the Crystal Palace on Sunday, who otherwise would be in the House of God. This is, no doubt, a very serious matter, but a simply preventive legislation will not remedy the moral mischief out of which the evil springs. For such, no system of safeguards can be successful. Men are beyond the reach of protection, who would use the term “national sanction” as the cloak of sin.