Christianity itself, as opposed to the example of its Founder upon
earth.

To these may be added another class of men--the stern and gloomy
enthusiasts, who would make earth a hell, and religion a torment:
men who, having wasted the earlier part of their lives in
dissipation and depravity, find themselves when scarcely past its
meridian, steeped to the neck in vice, and shunned like a loathsome
disease. Abandoned by the world, having nothing to fall back upon,
nothing to remember but time mis-spent, and energies misdirected,
they turn their eyes and not their thoughts to Heaven, and delude
themselves into the impious belief, that in denouncing the
lightness of heart of which they cannot partake, and the rational
pleasures from which they never derived enjoyment, they are more
than remedying the sins of their old career, and--like the founders
of monasteries and builders of churches, in ruder days--
establishing a good set claim upon their Maker.



CHAPTER III--AS IT MIGHT BE MADE



The supporters of Sabbath Bills, and more especially the extreme
class of Dissenters, lay great stress upon the declarations
occasionally made by criminals from the condemned cell or the
scaffold, that to Sabbath-breaking they attribute their first
deviation from the path of rectitude; and they point to these
statements, as an incontestable proof of the evil consequences