The Church Going into Captivity.
By Editor
"Ye shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my Sanctuary, I am the Lord." "Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee." "Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh thou shalt rest." "Bear no burden on the Sabbath, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem." Thickly sprinkled through the pages of holy writ are such commands and prohibitions as the above. The Sabbath is a moral institution. Human nature demands it. Public morals demand it. Civilization demands it, and its observance, so far from being a loss to commerce, is confessedly a gain. The divine institution of the Sabbath, then, is but an announcement from our Father, God, of a provision he has made to meet one of our present wants. And yet how feeble the influence of this testimony, rational and positive, upon the public heart. Sabbath desecration we fear is on the increase among us. Legislation by a resort to numerous subterfuges does but little to guard it, while the increase of railroads have ramified an increase of Sabbath-breaking all over the land. There are few corporations we believe in the country that come completely up to the mark of refusing to run trains on the Sabbath. In some of our cities the people can scarcely be said to have a Sabbath. In all of our cities, those who profoundly respect, we will not say piously regard, the Sabbath, are most fearfully in the minority. Municipal statutes seem in vain, because, we presume, the moral stamina is wanting in the proper place. From our own city, Chicago, we are prepared to speak from mournful observation. Our suburbs swarm with pleasure-takers, or rather, pleasure-seekers, but like the evil spirit, most of them wander through "desert places seeking rest and finding none." Many of our streets—with the more respectable business house closed to be sure—present little else than an extended scene of huckstery and revelry. Our eight or nine hundred lager-bier and gambling saloons, with generally closed doors or screened windows, it may be, roar with the bacchanalian song, or quiver in the struggle of the deadly melee, as if one were putting his ear to the key-hole of hades. Here ten thousand take a long and fearful step towards returnless degradation every Sabbath. One may stumble against reeling debauchery almost anywhere on the way to the sanctuary, and the apple-boy, or rather apple-man—meaner than boys generally get—stands sticking out his mercenary fingers for a dime within twenty steps of the altar of God. The police-court generally shows that the Sabbath is kept in Chicago, at least by the servants of Satan. But the most annoying fact yet remains to be named. Railroad companies, who, while they fatten a city, grow still fatter upon it, blow their whistles almost under the droppings of the sanctuary, or a train running the whole length of the city, often comes thundering in with a noise equal to the engagement of ten thousand infantry, and that, too, just at the time that our city pulpits, in rapt fervor, and with saving truth, are plying the wayward heart. This occurs Sabbath after Sabbath, and the churches bear the imposition without a murmur. Sometimes we think that some of the pew-holders are heavy stock-holders in the railroad. At other times we think that even members of the church, interested in the running of these trains are seated at the moment with a half-born tear in their eye just in front of the preacher, which tear, however, soon evaporates under a sudden change of thoughts. Sometimes we think—but perhaps it is uncharitable to think at all, but with that charity which believeth all things—that our preachers do all they can to remedy this evil. Some of them certainly do. But one thing we do think, viz., that such things are an arrant imposition, upon the worshiping part of Protestant Christians in our land. They should certainly be protected from nuisances and annoyances in their worship, and that too, especially on the Sabbath-day. To suffer the Christian Sabbath to be stricken down around our churches, is nearly equivalent to erasing our temples. The thing we say again is a base imposition, and it is a growing one. The church is being led captive, chained to the tail of a rail-car. She is now bearing her pilgrimage meekly, but take care, confound not meekness with cowardice. Let every friend of the rights of public worship, every friend of the holy Sabbath, speak out, and speak together, and continue not to cease to denounce these corrupt and corporate encroachments upon the prerogatives of the church.—N. W. C. Advocate.