elons in our fields. People who live a little out from
great cities see enough, and more than enough, of this sort of
Sabbath-keeping, with our loose American police.

"The fact is, our system of government was organized to go by moral
influences as much as mills by water, and Sunday was the great day for
concentrating these influences and bringing them to bear; and we might
just as well break down all the dams and let out all the water of the
Lowell mills, and expect still to work the looms, as to expect to work
our laws and constitution with European notions of religion.

"It is true the Puritan Sabbath had its disagreeable points. So have
the laws of Nature. They are of a most uncomfortable sternness and
rigidity; yet for all that, we would hardly join in a petition to have
them repealed, or made wavering and uncertain for human convenience.
We can bend to them in a thousand ways, and live very comfortably
under them."

"But," said Bob, "Sabbath-keeping is the iron rod of bigots; they
don't allow a man any liberty of his own. One says it's wicked to
write a letter Sunday; another holds that you must read no book but
the Bible; and a third is scandalized if you take a walk, ever so
quietly, in the fields. There are all sorts of quips and turns. We may
fasten things with pins of a Sunday, but it's wicked to fasten with
needle and thread, and so on, and so on; and each one, planting
himself on his own individual mode of keeping Sunday, points his guns
and frowns severely over the battlements on his neighbors whose
opinions and practice are different from his."

"Yet," said I, "Sabbath days are expressly mentioned by Saint Paul as
among those things concerning which no man should judge another. It
seems to me that the error as regards the Puritan Sabbath was in
representing it, not as a gift from God to man, but as a tribute of
man to God. Hence all these hagglings and nice questions and exactions
to the uttermost farthing. The holy time must be weighed and measured.
It must begin at twelve o'clock of one night, and end at twelve
o'clock of another; and from beginning to end, the mind must be kept
in a state of tension by the effort not to think any of its usual
thoughts or do any of its usual works. The fact is, that the
metaphysical, defining, hair-splitting mind of New England, turning
its whole powers on this one bit of ritual, this one only day of
divine service, which was left of all the feasts and fasts of the