SABBATH WORSHIP AT THE CRYSTAL PALACE.

1 Adam Street, Adelphi, 26th April 1854. Sra—In the article on the New Crystal Palace in your last week's number, you ask, "whether the enterprise is likely to pay without a Sunday admis- Sion ?" It seems to me, that great as would be the evil of this enterprise becoming a failure as a money speculation, still greater would be the evil of bolstering it up by anything morally wrong. It is undoubtedly a good and wise thing to consecrate and make holy the Sabbath by making it a day of

rest. It is an evil and unwise thing to make it a day of mere excitement. But it is quite as possible a thing to desecrate the Sabbath within the domicile as by walking abroad : and it is also quite possible to consecrate the Sabbath while walking abroad. It is recorded that Christ plucked ears of corn while walking through the fields on the Sabbath, and did eat. As to

taking money at the doors, if not for purposes of debauchery, there is no evil

in that. Railways, steam-boats, omnibuses, and public-houses all do that by law, and Cremorne not being permitted to take money for mere entrance charges it in the shape of refreshments of a stimulating kind. The " MD. co-guid " will call this iniquitous ; but it is an iniquity that is spreading, as witness the results of the late Scottish struggle for Sabbath Judaism. But religious temples also take money on the Sabbath, as in Catholic dm directly, and in Protestant churches indirectly in fees to pew-openers ;

are not charity sermons preached on Sunday, and are not popular or titled preachers sought out in order to swell the amount ? Are not chapels built as

building speculations by capitalists to accommodate rising talent in the pul- pit, and where is the difference between paying ls. per Sunday or 13s. per quarter ? Is it the respectability of the larger sum that constitutes the difference ? Surely not. The question, then, resolves itself into whether the object for which the money is taken at the doors be good or evil. The opposition has been strenuous, but it would be instructive to ascertain all the sources from which the opposition has arisen. I question if it be all from conscience. It would be curious to find the proprietors of Sunday gar- dens, or large brewers, or the heads of rival establishments amongst the number, and that trade and not religion was at the bottom of the assumed piety. That there be honest and religious opposers no one can doubt, but it does not follow that they constitute the mass. Some argue that Sabbath- opening will be a desecration of the Sabbath, for it will tempt the frequenters to debauchery. by the congregation of numbers ; others say that the behold- ing and studying works of art on the Sabbath is a profanity ; others, that it will turn the steps of the community away from the churches. With regard to the first proposition, it may be denied that the congregation of numbers causes the debauchery. Those who congregate together in churches in Glas- gow practise debauchery on the Sabbath after church, so far as they choose in whisky, without open congregation. They one by one pass into the wynds and closes and debauch in secret. And it is not even at public-houses that the worst kind of debauchery is practised in England, but in gin-palaces. Public tea-gardens are even a check on debauchery. With regard to study- ing works of art, people walk through the town to gaze at public monuments on the Sabbath. It would be very difficult to prevent this. As to attracting the community from the churches, the fault of that has been wholly with those who have the care of the churches, in permitting other places to be more attractive than those churches, with enormous power at their command. It will hardly be contended that the contemplation of God's works in parks or gardens on the Sabbath-day is an evil. It will not be contended that it is an evil in those who transact their business in London to dwell so far away from the city, that they may get the view of grass and green trees. Nor will it be contended that the Bishop of London has not done a wise thing by his proposition to remove thirty City churches. The denizens of London are gone, and the churches should follow them.

Now it is very certain that the location of the Crystal Palace at Syden- ham has been the cause of a great number of dwellings being erected them, and will induce great numbers more. It will also induce large numbers of working people to visit the locality on the only day in which they can walk abroad, while leaving undamaged the source of their living—their weekly wages. Here are a set of circumstances all working into the hands of the members of the Church if rightly taken advantage of. There is no law to prevent the working classes from getting out into the country on Sunday; and if there were, London would become a Glasgow, reeking with abominations. They will throng round the Crystal Palace. If the sun shines hot they will resort to the public-houses to slake their thirst. If rain falls they will have no other shelter. Beneath the shade and shelter of the Crystal Palace, paid for by the shilling, they will not need the aid of the public-house or its concomitants; and even if disposed to debauchery they will have a shilling less to expend on it.

Large bodies of men, women, and children, will congregate voluntarily, clean, decently clad, and in a happy frame of mind—in a mood to be taught. And shall nothing be done for them but to tell them that they are wickedly breaking the Sabbath by coming forth to gaze on God's works, and man's progress, though the Creator's promptings ? What more can the ministers of the Church desire than a large congregation on a beautiful spot away from the abodes of filth ? It is their own fault if they fail to reap an obvious advantage from it. Let them, then, build a church, or pro- cure that the Directors do it, on the very spot, within the very grounds where the people congregate, and prelude the calm day of contemplation by a fitting service to the Creator. I do not hold with the Voluntary principle in religious teaching ; for I would not have the minister be the mere mouthpiece of his congregation. I would not have the sermon lessened in its effect by the possibility of the minister's thoughts of his family turning his eyes to empty pews. For that reason I believe the principles of the Established Church to be the best. Without mooting sectarian questions, I mean simply that the minister's stipend should depend on the nation and not on the congregation ; and therefore doI address myself to the State Church rather than to any other, because the ministers of that church possess great power, and I would fain have diem use that power to generate religious emotions in the minds of the com- munity in the most effective mode.

All nations with perceptions of beauty have sought to convert beauty to the services of their religion. Beautiful Greek temples are found in beautiful localities. Altars are mostly on "high places.' The old Scotch Conventi- clers found their churches, "not made with hands," in mountain caverns and rocky wildernesses. The teachings of Christ were in corn-fields and vineyards, and orchards and olive-grounds, amidst the works of the Creator, in climates that permitted the open air to be a temple. Our climate does not permit of this, or assuredly it would not be an unholy thing to follow the teachings and precepts of the Master. It is quite certain that in order to induce religious feelings the surround- ing circumstances should be favourable. Art and nature should lend their joint aid. A calm, still evening, a beautiful country, and magnificent sun- rise or sunset, or moonlit night, have all a tendency to call up religious emotion. But a white-washed garret, a dull flaring candle, a foul cellar, a

noxious graveyard, a bare brick wall, unhealthy trees, squalid attire, are all

circumstances that tend to repress religious emotion. A city church, with tombstones on the walls and vehicles rattling past, and the fronts and backs of dwellings and shops visible through the windows is a mere arrangement for the concentration of worldly thoughts ; and the marvel is why such buildings should have continued to be so long inappropriated to the worship of the Creator. Dark and gloomy buildings are rather the abodes of super- stition than of religion, which should ever wear a cheerful garb.

"And God said, Let there be light : and there was light.' To the unedu- cated, the sensual, or even the sensuous, the effect of the gloomy church is

as a contrast to the bright sun or the brilliant gas-lighted palace of alcohol. The painted windows of the old cathedrals were doubtless devised as a com- pensation for the gloomy buildings our ancestors knew not how to light up sufficiently, or to raise to a genial temperature such as religious feeling demands. We must work by human means : a hungry man, a man starved for want of food, or by excess of cold, or devoid of decent garments, cannot have spontaneous religious emotions—the thing is impossible; and the only question is, how best to gather together a congregation and keep them to- gether in the full exercise of all their highest and holiest faculties. The pure, soft, warm air, under the shade of leafy trees, conveys to us the most perfect idea of a calm religious atmosphere, such as may have existed in the "Mount of Olives." Like the burning bush of Horeb, we need light without heat—only warmth. The Palace at Sydenham, which bids fair to attract so many to behold it, furnishes the solution of the problem. Of iron and glass should the temple be constructed that will shut out cold and wet, and give access to light, warmth, and beauty—a filmy tracery, like a magic web, or veil of the temple, or an invisible hand stretched over Eden. Not necessarily, though built of glass and iron, must the building in any respect resemble the Crystal " Palace of Art," though its site should be near at hand to gather the sheep into the fold. If with irreligious feelings, with mere sensuous objects, people have gathered together in the " Palace of Art," perchance they " may purge their guilt " in a temple worthy of the Creator.

The Crystal Palace is like a honeycomb or coral structure—a mere re- petition of a form or forms. For Christian art there is a wide scope in the everlasting tracery of the vegetable world, and imitative colouring without end in the glassy screen. The temple should be of a magnitude never be- fore approached, and divided into many chapels of the size adapted for hear- ing, wherein many chaplains might officiate at the same time. It would be in good taste to portray in these chapels the varied scenes of the Sa- viour's life and teaching. The olive and palm tree might be seen growing, and all the shrubs of the wilderness—their very odours might be breathed— to realize the events. And by the pencils of all our highest artists might be portrayed, with modern historical accuracy, lifelike pictures of all that interests Christians in their journies to the Holy Land, and their perusal of the New Testament.

We have artists and workmen of surpassing power. We have wealth such as the Catholic Church never possessed. We have a priesthood need- ing to gather a fast hold of the community ; and the means lie before them, and yet they have not done it. It is within the power of truly religious men to accomplish it, for the subscriptions of the wealthy of all ranks would pour in in emulous competition. Nothing could be more popular with the wealthy and powerful. It would not be a St. Peter's nor a St. Paul's, it would not be a Valhalla nor a Museum. It would be a Garden of Eden, in which to speak the words of holiness, a gathering together of God's works around his created men, and of which Creator and created might alike pro- nounce " It is good!"

Men of religious temperament will readily comprehend the value of this proposition. And it will bear analyzing by the most matter-of-fact person. We seek for beauty in our churches, and all we do is to imitate bygone things. We have committed error upon error in our zeal, building new churches in the abodes of squalor, the abodes that the people must ulti- mately escape from; or if they remain in the same localities by the structure of better abodes, then the churches will be unworthy of the new time. In the union of the vegetable world with our temple architecture, we shall ac- complish what we desire, and build on the natural principles of beauty. What is there more beautiful than the clinging and climbing shrubs round our old ruined abbeys, Glastonbury, and Tintern, and Furness, and others? Yet there may be much more beauty in the intermingling of plants with delicate metallic tracery. Slender stone is a fallacy—Ruskin notwithstanding : we know that it has not strength, and a building without strength is a cheat and a mockery, a mere piece of theatrical scenery. The beauty in the ancient moss-grown ruins lies in the fact that the roofs and weight are gone, and the mind is not oppressed with a sense of insecurity. If such a temple were erected on Sydenham Hill, the religious world, at least those of the Established Church, would soon cease to lament over the attractions of the mere Palace of Art, Build the temple, and put into its reading-desks and pulpits men worthy of it ; build such temples, not merely at Sydenham, but in other places also, where men may congregate by the easiest transit—the rail—and the Protestant Church will cease to lie under the reproach, that while Catholics and Mahometans and Mormons are the erecters of temples, they, the Protestants, have shut themselves out from beauty, and have only constructed buildings. If the Protestant Bishops neglect this new art, and its concomitants, while wailing over the possible evil of Sydenham, they will have the merit and the honour taken from them by the ever-ready Catholics, who will have the opportunity of thus cheaply multiplying their places of worship, and setting the example of religious structures and embellishments adapted to the present state of progress and condition of humanity. Not in an uneatbolic spirit do I speak, but in the belief of an all-embracing faith in our future time, when Protestants shall cease to " protest," and shall take a less polemic designation, and when Catholics shall become more catholic, and both, and all, alike shall turn away in universal horror from the thought of persecution under the plea of conscience and a blasphemous assumption of vindicating the Creator's will.

The erection of a cathedral in stone involves the defect that before the building is finished a portion of it needs renewal. The appliances of modern art can render iron permanent. And trees, shrubs, plants, and flowers, the works of the Creator, that were the ornaments of Christ's own churches in garden and wilderness, are a source of never-ending beauty.

A worthy temple is a work of some time ; but, meanwhile, the Directors of the Crystal Palace would act wisely in erecting a temporary building, or setting apart a portion of their present building, for the purposes of a church, and placing it at the disposal of religious men for divine service on the Sab- bath, morning, afternoon, and evening. The promenaders through and amongst the works of art and nature would be attracted to this church : and it must be remembered that it is not the dissolute but the contemplative who would be chiefly attracted to Sydenham. The dissolute, after their curiosity is satisfied, will continue to visit their more appropriate haunts as before. If the Directors do this, giving to their building and grounds a re- ligious character on the Sunday, it would be an opprobrium on any legisla- ture to enforce on them a compulsory closing of their doors with the penalty of a commercial failure.

There is something monstrous in the idea that so much beauty should be closed against access on Sunday—driving the unsinning out of Eden—on the pretext that the payment of a shilling is a crime, while it is no crime to pay a shilling on the railway for access to the exterior, and the contingency of the neighbouring public-houses. It is not the mere question of the prosperity of the Company, that is at stake. It is a question whether other and greater things, of which this is but the pioneer, shall be retarded for a considerable period, as was the building of large iron ships by the misfortune of the Great Britain. It is a question whether squalor and filth and vice shall be extirpated by purity and beauty and virtue—whether the dawning of our physical sociology, and consequent growth of mind and morals, shall be arrested by an irreligious or trading op- position. .Re-ligere is to bind together ; and they will best serve religion who congregate together the greatest number of their fellows in the con- templation of the works of the Creator, in a pure atmosphere, free from the mephitic taints of ill-drained streets and enclosed and covered spaces which are not homes. It will be wise in the Directors to provide the building, and wise in the clergy, to avail themselves of it, and earn the blessing of the working com- munity by pressing on the Legislature for a boon fraught with every gocd and unalloyed by evil.