University of Virginia Library

The Puritan Sabbath—is there such a thing
existing now, or has it gone with the things
that were, to be looked at as a curiosity in the
museum of the past? Can any one, in memory,
take himself back to the unbroken stillness
of that day, and recall the sense of religious
awe which seemed to brood in the very atmosphere,
checking the merry laugh of childhood,
and chaining in unwonted stillness the tongue
of volatile youth, and imparting even to the
sunshine of heaven, and the unconscious notes
of animals, a tone of its own gravity and repose?
If you cannot remember these things,
go back with me to the verge of early boyhood,
and live with me one of the Sabbaths
that I have spent beneath the roof of my uncle,
Phineas Fletcher.

Imagine the long sunny hours of a Saturday
afternoon insensibly slipping away, as we
youngsters are exploring the length and breadth

of a trout-stream, or chasing gray squirrels, or
building mud milldams in the brook. The sun
sinks lower and lower, but we still think it
does not want half an hour to sundown. At
last, he so evidently is really going down, that
there is no room for skepticism or latitude of
opinion on the subject; and with many a lingering
regret, we began to put away our fish-hooks,
and hang our hoops over our arm, preparatory
to trudging homeward.

“Oh, Henry, don't you wish that Saturday
afternoons lasted longer?” said little John to
me.

“I do,” says Cousin Bill, who was never the
boy to mince matters in giving his sentiments;
“and I wouldn't care if Sunday didn't come
but once a year.”

“Oh, Bill, that's wicked, I'm afraid,” says
little conscientious Susan, who, with her doll
in hand, was coming home from a Saturday afternoon
visit.

“Can't help it,” says Bill, catching Susan's
bag, and tossing it in the air; “I never did like
to sit still, and that's why I hate Sundays.”

“Hate Sundays! oh, Bill! Why, Aunt Kezzy
says Heaven is an eternal Sabbath—only think
of that!”

“Well, I know I must be pretty different

from what I am now before I could sit still forever,”
said Bill, in a lower and somewhat disconcerted
tone, as if admitting the force of the
consideration.

The rest of us began to look very grave, and
to think that we must get to liking Sunday
some time or other, or it would be a very bad
thing for us. As we drew near the dwelling,
the compact and business like form of Aunt
Kezzy was seen emerging from the house to
hasten our approach.

“How often have I told you, young ones,
not to stay out after sundown on Saturday
night? Don't you know it's the same as Sunday,
you wicked children, you? Come right
into the house, every one of you, and never
let me hear of such a thing again.”

This was Aunt Kezzy's regular exordium every
Saturday night, for we children, being blinded,
as she supposed, by natural depravity, always
made strange mistakes in reckoning time
on Saturday afternoons. After being duly suppered
and scrubbed, we were enjoined to go to
bed, and remember that to-morrow was Sunday,
and that we must not laugh and play in the
morning. With many a sorrowful look did Susan
deposite her doll in the chest, and give one
lingering look at the patchwork she was piecing

for dolly's bed, while William, John, and
myself emptied our pockets of all superfluous
fish-hooks, bits of twine, pop-guns, slices of potato,
marbles, and all the various items of boy
property, which, to keep us from temptation,
were taken into Aunt Kezzy's safe keeping
over Sunday.

My Uncle Phineas was a man of great exactness,
and Sunday was the centre of his
whole worldly and religious system. Everything
with regard to his worldly business was
so arranged that by Saturday noon it seemed
to come to a close of itself. All his accounts
were looked over, his workmen paid, all borrowed
things returned, and lent things sent after,
and every tool and article belonging to the
farm was returned to its own place at exactly
such an hour every Saturday afternoon, and an
hour before sundown every item of preparation,
even to the blacking of his Sunday shoes
and the brushing of his Sunday coat, was entirely
concluded; and at the going down of the
sun, the stillness of the Sabbath seemed to settle
down over the whole dwelling.

And now it is Sunday morning; and though
all without is fragrance, and motion, and beauty,
the dewdrops are twinkling, butterflies fluttering,
and merry birds carolling and racketing as

if they never could sing loud or fast enough, yet
within there is such a stillness that the tick of
the tall mahogany clock is audible through the
whole house, and the buzz of the blue flies, as
they whiz along up and down the window panes,
is a distinct item of hearing. Look into the
best front room, and you may see the upright
form of my Uncle Phineas, in his immaculate
Sunday clothes, with his Bible spread open on
the little stand before him, and even a deeper
than usual gravity settling down over his toil-worn
features. Alongside, in well-brushed
Sunday clothes, with clean faces and smooth
hair, sat the whole of us younger people, each
drawn up in a chair, with hat and handkerchief
ready for the first stroke of the bell, while
Aunt Kezzy, all trimmed, and primmed, and
made ready for meeting, sat reading her psalm
book, only looking up occasionally to give an
additional jerk to some shirt-collar, or the fifteenth
pull to Susan's frock, or to repress any
straggling looks that might be wandering about
“beholding vanity!”

A stranger, in glancing at Uncle Phineas as
he sat intent on his Sunday reading, might have
seen that the Sabbath was in his heart—there
was no mistake about it. It was plain that he
had put by all worldly thoughts when he shut

up his account-book, and that his mind was as
free from every earthly association as his Sunday
coat was from dust. The slave of worldliness,
who is driven, by perplexing business or
adventurous speculation, through the hours of
a half-kept Sabbath to the fatigues of another
week, might envy the unbroken quiet, the sunny
tranquillity which hallowed the weekly rest
of my uncle.

The Sabbath of the Puritan Christian was the
golden day, and all its associations, and all its
thoughts, words, and deeds, were so entirely
distinct from the ordinary material of life, that
it was to him a sort of weekly translation—a
quitting of this world to sojourn a day in a better;
and year after year, as each Sabbath set its
seal on the completed labours of a week, the pilgrim
felt that one more stage of his earthly journey
was completed, and that he was one week
nearer to his eternal rest. And as years, with
their changes, came on, and the strong man grew
old, and missed, one after another, familiar forms
that had risen around his earlier years, the face
of the Sabbath became like that of an old and
tried friend, carrying him back to the scenes of
his youth, and connecting him with scenes long
gone by, restoring to him the dew and freshness
of brighter and more buoyant days.

Viewed simply as an institution for a Christian
and mature mind, nothing could be more
perfect than the Puritan Sabbath: if it had any
failing, it was in the want of adaptation to children,
and to those not interested in its peculiar
duties. If you had been in the dwelling of my
uncle of a Sabbath morning, you must have
found the unbroken stillness delightful; the
calm and quiet must have soothed and disposed
you for contemplation, and the evident appearance
of single-hearted devotion to the duties of
the day in the elder part of the family must
have been a striking addition to the picture.
But, then, if your eye had watched attentively
the motions of us juveniles, you might have
seen that what was so very invigorating to the
disciplined Christian was a weariness to young
flesh and bones. Then there was not, as now,
the intellectual relaxation afforded by the Sunday-school,
with its various forms of religious
exercise, its thousand modes of interesting and
useful information. Our whole stock in this
line was the Bible and primer, and these were
our main dependance for whiling away the tedious
hours between our early breakfast and
the signal for meeting. How often was our invention
stretched to find wherewithal to keep
up our stock of excitement in a line with the

duties of the day. For the first half hour, perhaps,
a story in the Bible answered our purpose
very well; but, having despatched the history
of Joseph, or the story of the ten plagues, we
then took to the primer: and then there was,
first, the looking over the system of theological
and ethical truth, commencing, “In Adam's fall
we sinned all,” and extending through three or
four pages of pictorial and poetic embellishment.
Next was the death of John Rogers,
who was burned at Smithfield; and for a while
we could entertain ourselves with counting all
his “nine children and one at the breast,” as in
the picture they stand in a regular row, like a
pair of stairs. These being done, came miscellaneous
exercises of our own invention, such as
counting all the psalms in the psalm-book backward
and forward, to and from the Doxology,
or numbering the books in the Bible, or some
other such device as we deemed within the pale
of religious employments. When all these
failed, and it still wanted an hour of meeting-time,
we looked up at the ceiling, and down at
the floor, and all around into every corner, to
see what we could do next; and happy was he
who could spy a pin gleaming in some distant
crack, and forthwith muster an occasion for getting
down to pick it up. Then there was the
infallible recollection that we wanted a drink of
water, as an excuse to get out to the well; or
else we heard some strange noise among the
chickens, and insisted that it was essential that
we should see what was the matter; or else
pussy would jump on to the table, when all of
us would spring to drive her down; while there
was a most assiduous watching of the clock to
see when the first bell would ring. Happy was
it for us, in the interim, if we did not begin to
look at each other and make up faces, or slyly
slip off and on our shoes, or some other incipient
attempts at roguery, which would gradually
so undermine our gravity that there would be
some sudden explosion of merriment, whereat
Uncle Phineas would look up and say “tut,
tut,” and Aunt Kezzy would make a speech
about wicked children breaking the Sabbath
day. I remember once how my cousin Bill got
into deep disgrace one Sunday by a roguish
trick. He was just about to close his Bible with
all sobriety, when snap came a grasshopper
through an open window, and alighted in the
middle of the page. Bill instantly kidnapped
the intruder, for so important an auxiliary in the
way of employment was not to be despised.
Presently we children looked towards Bill, and
there he sat, very demurely reading his Bible,
with the grasshopper hanging by one leg from
the corner of his mouth, kicking and sprawling,
without in the least disturbing Master William's
gravity. We all burst into an uproarious laugh.
But it came to be rather a serious affair for Bill,
as his good father was in the practice of enforcing
truth and duty by certain modes of moral
suasion much recommended by Solomon,
though fallen into disrepute at the present day.

This morning picture may give a good specimen
of the whole livelong Sunday, which presented
only an alternation of similar scenes
until sunset, when a universal unchaining of
tongues and a general scamper proclaimed
that the “sun was down.”

But, it may be asked, what was the result of
all this strictness? Did it not disgust you with
the Sabbath and with religion? No, it did
not. It did not, because it was the result of no
unkindly feeling, but of consistent principle; and
consistency of principle is what even children
learn to appreciate and revere. The law of
obedience and of reverence for the Sabbath
was constraining so equally on the young and
the old, that its claims came to be regarded
like those immutable laws of nature, which no
one thinks of being out of patience with, though
they sometimes bear hard on personal convenience.

The effect of the system was to ingrain
into our character a veneration for the
Sabbath which no friction of after life would
ever efface. I have lived to wander in many
climates and foreign lands, where the Sabbath
is an unknown name, or where it is only recognised
by noisy mirth; but never has the day
returned without bringing with it a breathing of
religious awe, and even a yearning for the unbroken
stillness, the placid repose, and the simple
devotion of the Puritan Sabbath