SABBATH PARIAHS.

We are overwhelmed with “Chips” from letter-writers, letter-senders, letter-receivers, letter-sorters, and post-office clerks. Our own office has become a post-office. It would seem as if all the letters that ought to have been written for delivery on several previous Sundays in the ordinary course, and by the agency of the great establishment in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, have only not been indited in order that we might be the sufferers. Doubtless, the other channels of public information have equally received in the course of each week the surplus of what would have been, but for the Plumptre and Ashley obstruction, Sunday letters. The public are in arms, and every arm has a pen at the end; every pen is dipped in the blackest ink of indignation, or is tinged with the milder tint of remonstrance.

Our most desperate remonstrants are provincial post-office clerks; for it would appear that Lord Ashley’s outcasts from Sunday society have a worse chance of being received into it now than ever. Their labours are in many cases so heavy on Saturday nights, that they are obliged to lie in bed during the whole of church time on Sunday, to recover from their fatigues.

We select one from the heap, for publication. The writer gives a clear account of the hardships of a provincial post-office clerk before he was relieved from Sunday duty by the Royal mandate.

“Sir,

“For three years I was what you are pleased to call in your article on the ‘Sunday Screw’ a Post-Office Pariah, at an office in a most ‘corresponding’ town; my Sunday duties were as follows:—at four I rose, sorted my letters and newspapers, delivered them to the messengers, sorted and stamped (both sides) the letters for the cross-country mails, swept out and dusted the place, then I went to my room again, had a nap, rose, washed, and dressed in my best; I came down to breakfast at eight, took a walk, till Church time, and amused myself till five in the afternoon, when I attended at the office and received letters till half-past six.

379“I usually attended divine service; at eight I sorted and stamped the letters and dispatched the mails; at nine I had done my work; all this I did myself and never dreamed of being assisted. The rush of business is now, I understand, so great on the arrival of the Saturday afternoon mails, that every assistant and Post-Office clerk will wish Lord Ashley safely imprisoned in the Whited Sepulchres.

“Your, very obediently,

“Ex-Pariah.”

Judging from the tone in which the earnest remonstrances from all kinds of people that pile our tables are couched, we fear that, during the last few Sundays, the bulk of the disappointed public in the provinces has benefited very little by the change in a moral point of view. Vexation has, we fear, taken the place of that religious, calm, and beneficent state of mind in which the Sabbath ought to be passed. The object, therefore, of the promoters of the measure—increased veneration for the first day of the week—has failed; for of course their whole and sole object in the affair has been the furtherance of the cause of religion, and not a desire to get quits with Mr. Rowland Hill for the calm, manly, triumphant manner in which he caused truth to vanquish them in the recent agitation on the same question.