of coaling are still worse; and that the white authorities have
tried in vain to keep them down. The coaling system is, no doubt,
demoralising in itself, as it enables Negroes of the lowest class to
earn enough in one day to keep them in idleness, even in luxury, for
a week or more, till the arrival of the next steamer. But what we
saw proceeded rather from the mere excitability and coarseness of
half-civilised creatures than from any deliberate depravity; and we
were told that, in the island just mentioned, the Negroes, when
forced to coal on Sunday, or on Christmas Day, always abstain from
noise or foul language, and, if they sing, sing nothing but hymns.
It is easy to sneer at such a fashion as formalism. It would be
wiser to consider whether the first step in religious training must
not be obedience to some such external positive law; whether the
savage must not be taught that there are certain things which he
ought never to do, by being taught that there is one day at least on
which he shall not do them. How else is man to learn that the Laws
of Right and Wrong, like the laws of the physical world, are
entirely independent of him, his likes or dislikes, knowledge or
ignorance of them; that by Law he is environed from his cradle to
his grave, and that it is at his own peril that he disobeys the Law?
A higher religion may, and ought to, follow, one in which the Law
becomes a Law of Liberty, and a Gospel, because it is loved, and
obeyed for its own sake; but even he who has attained to that must
be reminded again and again, alas! that the Law which he loves does
not depend for its sanction on his love of it, on his passing frames
or feelings; but is as awfully independent of him as it is of the
veriest heathen. And that lesson the Sabbath does teach as few or
no other institutions can. The man who says, and says rightly, that
to the Christian all days ought to be Sabbaths, may be answered, and
answered rightly, 'All the more reason for keeping one day which