How the Change Was Made in England.
ONE would hardly suppose that Protestants could be guilty of resorting to cruelty for the suppression of Sabbath observance, yet our forefathers in England imprisoned and put to death those who dared for conscience’ sake to observe the Sabbath of the Bible. England had her Court of “High Commission” and “Star Chamber,” which were patterned after the Roman Inquisition. About the year 1618 John Thrask, or Trask, wrote and spoke in favor of the seventh day as the only Sabbath. He and others who preached the same doctrine were accused of Judaizing. Fuller, in his “Church History of Britain” (Vol. 3, pages 306, 307), says: “Now, of the broachers of Judaism, John Thrask was a principal. . . . He seduced many souls with his tenets, and his own wife amongst many others. For these he was censured in the Star Chamber, but afterwards recanted his opinions and lived as unsettled in judgment as place in several parts of the kingdom. . . . He afterwards relapsed, not into the same, but other opinions, rather humorous than hurtful, and died at Lambeth in the reign of King Charles. Nor must we forget that his wife could never be imperverted again, but perished in her Judaism.” Thrask was sentenced by the Star Chamber “to be set on a pillory in Westminster and from thence whipped to the fleet and there to remain a prisoner.” “Mrs. Thrask lay fifteen or sixteen years a prisoner for her opinion about the Saturday Sabbath.” “One Mr. Hedden, a prisoner in the new prison, that lay there for holding Saturday Sabbath,” is also mentioned. In the year 1628, Theophilus Brabourne published a “book dedicated to his Majesty entitled, ‘A Defense of the Most Ancient and Sacred Ordinance of God, the Sabbath Day,’ maintaining therein: 1. The fourth commandment simply and entirely moral. 2. Christians, as well as Jews, obliged to the everlasting observation of that day. 3. That the Lord’s day is an ordinary working day, it being will-worship and superstition to make it a Sabbath by virtue of the fourth commandment. But while Mr. Brabourne was marching furiously and crying Victoria to himself, he fell into the ambush of the High Commission, whose well-tempered severity herein so prevailed upon him, that submitting himself to a private conference, and perceiving the unsoundness of his own principles, he became a convert, conforming himself quietly to the Church of England.”—Fuller, Vol. 3, p. 419. In 1638 John Pocklington, D. D., published a sermon entitled “Sunday No Sabbath,” and was sentenced “to be deprived of his ecclesiastical preferments, to be forever disabled to hold any place of dignity in the church or commonwealth, never to come within the verge of His Majesty’s court, and his books to be burned by the hand of the common hangman in the city of London and the two universities.”—Neal’s Hist. of the Puritans, Harper & Bros., Vol. 1, p. 360. In 1642 James Ockford published a book entitled “Doctrine of the Fourth Commandment,” which met the same fate as Pocklington’s. John James continued to meet with a small church of worshipers in Bull-steak Alley, White-chapel, London, who believed the seventh day was the Sabbath, and met for worship on that day. On the 19th day of October, 1661, while preaching to his congregation, he was taken from his pulpit before a bench of justices sitting at the Half-Moon Tavern and committed to prison. At his trial, about a month later, he was sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered, which sentence was duly executed. This was done in the name of treason, but the real offense was that he and his church observed the Sabbath. Francis Bampfield, an educated minister and an observer of the Sabbath of the Bible, published a book on the Sabbath in 1672. In consequence of this and his practice and preaching, he suffered imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for eight years. On his release he continued to preach his sentiments, and was again arrested and imprisoned at Salisbury. Being once more released, he went to London. Here again he was arrested, with a number of his friends, who were sentenced to prison for life or during the pleasure of the king, and where Bampfield died. The above pictures of Sabbath repression are only examples of what may have been seen in the last thousand years all over Europe, from the Mediterranean Sea to the German Ocean, and over Southern Asia to the river Indus, and present indisputable evidence of the manner in which the Sabbath was put down and the Sunday built up.—Light of Home.