4. It is true, then, speaking of the people of Scotland generally, that we rest our Sabbath observance on Divine appointment, and that we cling tenaciously to a whole Sabbath. This is our crown, which I trust no one will ever take from us, and which, indeed, can only be lost in a community of free men, by being voluntarily and guiltily abdicated. But in what I have hitherto said, I have spoken more of our Scottish principles than of our Scottish practice; and when I come to speak of this, _I find myself constrained to protest against two opposite representations that have been given of our Sabbath-keeping_, the one in the form of injurious caricature, and the other in a style of over-colouring that very greatly exceeds the sober reality. Of all the bold pictures in which certain of our modern novelists have indulged, there is none in which they have allowed their imaginations a more wild and unwarranted licence, than in the pictures with which they have entertained their readers of a Sabbath in a Scottish family. These pictures have been creations rather than caricatures. And there have been travellers who have become writers of fiction when they have touched on this subject, and who have quite equalled the novel-writers in the liberties they have taken with the simple truth. One writer, presuming, we suppose, on the safe distance of his readers from the scene which he describes, gravely informs them that in the city of Edinburgh all the window-blinds are kept carefully closed during the whole of the Sabbath, as if to attemper the gloom of the house to the gloomy state of mind of its inmates, and describes the little children as cowering under a vague sense of awe, and dreading to indulge even an innocent smile. Men who write thus may safely be affirmed never to have spent a single Sabbath-day in a religious family in Scotland. That the Sabbath is in no instance presented in a repulsive form before the young, by their rather being told what they are not to do, than of the blessed work to which the Sabbath summons them, it would be too much to affirm; for what institution of heaven does not occasionally suffer from human handling? But our danger, even in Scotland, in these days, does not arise from over-restraint or scrupulosity; and we speak from long and happy experience, when we assert that our Sabbath-keeping in Scotland is usually marked by a calm cheerfulness without frivolity, and that on that day, above all others, streams of gladness flow through myriads of hearts which have their secret and their fountain-head not in the exclusion of religion, but in the more complete turning of the mind to religious thoughts and associations.
"Then wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet, retired solitude, Where, with her best nurse, Contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets go her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired."
How is it but on this account, that Scotsmen who have emigrated to our colonies have in so many instances written of their Sabbath evenings at home as among the most "sunny memories" of their youth? And it is a fact of much significance that an old ecclesiastical law of Scotland expressly provides that a religious fast shall never be held on the Lord's day, for this special reason, that the Sabbath was intended to be a day of joy.
5. _On the other hand, we are bound to acknowledge that there have been foreign brethren who have visited our island-shores, that have traced the picture of our Scottish Sabbath in colours greatly brighter than the reality._--They have only seen half the truth, and therefore they have only told the half. As they have beheld the streams of our church-going people crowding along the streets of our cities to our numerous temples, they have failed to reflect how even the best gifts of heaven, the Sabbath and the sunlight, are the most ready to be abused, and that, at that very moment, there were thousands loitering at home in indolence, and even not a few, perhaps, rioting in intemperance. At the same time, with all these sombre exceptions, that are necessary to be introduced as shadows into any truthful picture of a Scottish Sabbath, we do not wonder that good and intelligent visitors from continental countries have been impressed and delighted by the spectacle of such a day in Scotland. These are but exceptions after all. And there is surely something of high moral sublimity in the sight of a whole people, once in every week, ceasing from their business and their toil to celebrate the great facts of Creation and Redemption--"the plough left to sleep in the furrow," the loom motionless, the anvil silent, the mine and the factory tenantless, and the whole monotony of common life turned and elevated into a kind of sacred praise. This solemn pause over the wide extent of Scotland, seen still more perfectly in her rural districts than in her great cities, strikes us as the nearest approach we have ever known to national worship. And we do not wonder that all the great poets of our land,--our uninspired prophets, whose work it is to reflect and to idealise our purest national feelings,--should so often have "sung the Sabbath," and that the Sabbath pictures of our national poet Burns in his "Cottar's Saturday Night," though, alas, he seldom consecrated his great gifts to religion, shine as the most beautiful passages in a poem that seems marked for immortality.