What caused Dickens and Spurgeon to have opposite attitudes on the Sabbath? Spurgeon believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and Dickens did not. For a person to love the Sabbath, he must love the Lord of the Sabbath. If God sets aside every Sunday for worship, a believer is “glad when the Sabbath arrives,” because he “look[s] forward to it with delight.”[12] When the services end, the believer would “wish that Sabbaths were never over” and would “look forward to the next occasion when we should meet the saints of God.”[13]

Charles Dickens utilized his pen to influence his readers’ opinions. In a Christmas Carol, he strikes out against the ill-treatment of the poor through stinginess. He prescribed for Scrooge’s spirit to be replaced with the love for the common man. In another work, Little Dorrit, Dickens turned threatening eyes upon a practice that stifles man’s freedom to live and enjoy life. What has enchained man to a life of bondage? The answer is the Victorian Sabbath.

The narrator in his story described “a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale.… Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency.”[1] Dickens considered the Victorian Sabbath to be punishment for the laborer who toiled the previous six days. “Nothing for the spent toiler to do,” lamented the narrator, “but to compare the monotony of the seventh day with the monotony of his six days.”[2]

To replace the Victorian Sabbath, Dickens advocated for Sunday societies along with other intellectuals in Britian.[3] These groups began meeting in the 1860s and replaced the traditional Christian sermon with a lecture on science or another subject. Thus, the common man, on his only day off a week, would have another option of inquiry than attending a depressing church service. For Dickens, the Victorian Sabbath produced misery and not joy.

Charles Spurgeon, however, came to the opposite conclusion. God gave humanity the Christian Sabbath as a day of joy. “Time is the ring,” he preached, “and these Sabbaths are the diamonds set in it.… The Sabbaths are the beds full of rich choice flowers.”[4] Elsewhere, he called the Sabbath “the pearl of the week”[5] and “a day to feast yourselves in God.”[6] Moreover, “they are full of brightness, and joy, and delight.”[7]

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