8. But while it is unquestionable that the Sabbath argument has gained a large and permanent addition to its force from the experience and discussions of the last twenty years in Scotland, I have already said enough to apprise you that _this divine and truly beneficent institution is not without its enemies and its dangers_. I shall be forgiven when I express my fear that the increased influx of persons from other countries in which "the day of the Lord" is less honoured and hallowed, has had some effect in lowering the standard of its observance among ourselves.--I do not think that the arguments of ultra-spiritualists, who tell us that every day should be a Sabbath, has had much effect in misleading any who were not already willing to be misled. The device was too transparently shallow to do much harm where it had the characteristic shrewdness of the Scottish mind to deal with it. For why, it was answered, on the same principle, might it not be said that men should be always praying; and that therefore it was unnecessary to have fixed times and places for our secret devotions, and that we ought to dispense with the use of words. It was noticed, moreover, that if things were not sometimes solemnly done, they were likely to be never done, and that "every day a Sabbath" came practically to mean "no Sabbath at all."--At one period the railway system, which attempted to introduce with it railway travelling and traffic on the Lord's day, threatened to do violence to our religions convictions and national habits, and to introduce among us a wide-spread and constantly-growing mischief. But this plague was speedily stayed. The religious traditions of our community proved in most instances too strong for the cupidity of men who seemed prepared to sacrifice the highest interests, and to trample on the most sacred feelings of a whole community, for the sake of a larger annual dividend. The majority of our railways in Scotland do not run trains on Sabbath at all; and this is found to operate with immense gain to the public morals, with no inconvenience to trade or commerce, or even pecuniary loss to the proprietors of those stupendous undertakings.
9. But there is an influence at work which has already in some degree invaded our Sabbath-keeping in Scotland, and which I fear is working far more extensive and serious moral havoc in England. _I refer to the attempt which is made in so many places, and by so many parties, to use the day which has been given for sacred rest and religious worship, as a day of entertainment and amusement._--Picture galleries, Crystal palaces, museums of nature and art, or romantic scenes to which men can be carried in crowds by Sunday excursion-trains, are sought to be substituted for visits to the house of prayer, and for Christian instruction and worship. The argument for this insidious and perilous exchange is sometimes put in a kind of religious phraseology, as if these visits to beautiful scenes in nature were only the introduction to another kind of worship, and as if gazing upon the master-pieces of human art in painting, or sculpture, or architecture, exercised a purifying and elevating influence on the mind; and sometimes again it is dressed in the form of a spurious philanthropy, though it is found that those who are the most earnest advocates for the Crystal Palace or the Sabbath excursion-train, generally expect to derive pecuniary advantage from the practice. There never was an argument more triumphantly met by sound philosophy, or more completely refuted by experience. There is no denying, indeed, that visits to high works of art, to objects of curiosity, or to beautiful scenes in the natural world, may at their own time, and in their own place, be beneficial to the busiest and the poorest. But those who imagine that any of these things are capable, in any degree, of being a substitute for the weekly-recurring exercises of Christian worship, and instruction in the great truths of divine revelation, are strangely ignorant of the greatest wants and necessities of man. Who ever heard of looking upon pictures and images, however much they might breathe with genius, transforming the vile to pure, the earthly to divine! It is not by such appliances as these that the heart of any man has ever been made anew. The fact is, it is rather the ├Žsthetic than the moral part of our nature that is influenced by them at all. They refine, but they cannot transform. They may "form the capital of the column, but not its base." The city of Munich contains one of the grandest picture-galleries in Europe, and it is also one of the most demoralized and debased of our European communities. The brigands around Rome were accustomed at the Carnival to visit the picture-galleries in that city, and many shewed high appreciation and discrimination in judging of the works both of ancient and of modern painters, but these influences never succeeded in wooing one of them from his life of violence and crime. And if the history of ancient Greece in its decay reads one lesson to the world more loudly than another, it is this, that refinement of taste may be associated in the same individual and people with the greatest debasement and corruption of morals.