Children's Sundays made wearisome--Sunday precious to workers--Moral
workers--Moral vices--Our gifts--Misuse of them--Necessary work on
Sunday--Diminished by management--Sunday prevents us living too
fast--The rest must be earned--Sunday repairs the human machine.
Do not let Sunday be turned into a day of dread to the children. It is
the day which the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. For
years I lived in terror of the Sunday, and I feel for children who,
being brought more into the presence of their elders on that day, are
consequently more exposed to reproof for their natural animal spirits,
which are trying to jaded and irritable persons. An only child, I was
taken twice a day to a church built in the dismal style of the reign of
George III., and put into a high pew, "shut up in a cupboard," as I
have heard a little child express it, where I could only see a
frightful ornament like a row of teeth in painted woodwork that ran
round the upper part of the church. I sat contemplating this through
the long low church service and sermon, of which I was too young to
understand a word. The remainder of the day was filled up with collect,
epistle, and catechism, Bible questions to write and answer, the text
to remember, hymns to repeat to visitors, and a prolonged dessert, with
half a glass of sherry, which was like a dose of physic to me. The
"Life of Joseph" was my only recreation.
Too often is Sunday given up to the display of toilet vanities out of
doors and listlessness at home. Those who have been really working
during the week know well what a blessing the Sunday rest is. Those who
have been idle cannot expect to feel this, and they experience such a
flatness in the quietly kept Sunday that they regard it as a weekly
penance which interrupts their pleasures. But they ought not to have
allowed themselves to get into this condition of feeling. There is work
for all in the world; none but the dead have a right to be idle.
As Kingsley justly asks: "If vanity, profligacy, pride, and idleness be
not moral vices, what are?" What is more common than to find pride and
vanity leading our women to idleness, and that extravagance and craving
after gaiety which are the feminine form of profligacy? And Kingsley
goes on to show that beneath these vices, and perhaps the cause of them
all, lies another and deeper vice--godlessness, atheism.
"I do not," continues he, "mean merely the want of religion, doctrinal
unbelief. I mean want of belief in duty, in responsibility. Want of
belief that there is a living God governing the universe, who has set
us our work, and will judge us according to our work."