1
Sunday should be a day of gladness, and of light and beauty, for it
is then that the forthright religionist is closest to his God, and
when he is, if ever, in communion with the Holy Spirit and presumably
receives instruction with which to confound the wicked during the
ensuing week. But in small communities which suffer from the blight of
religion it never is, and when I was a boy in Farmington Sunday was a
day of dreadful gloom; over everything hung an atmosphere of morbid
fear and dejection. In the morning the whole town donned its Sunday
suit, almost always black and funereal and depressing, and therefore
becoming to religious practice, and trudged sorrowfully and solemnly
to Sunday School and to church, there to wail doleful hymns and hear
an unlearned man “measure with words the immeasurable and sink the
string of thought into the fathomless;” and beseech the Lord upon
the universal prayer theme of “gimme.” Then the village marched, in
mournful cadence, back home for Sunday dinner. But before the meal was
eaten the juvenile members of the religious household were commanded
to remove their sabbath raiment, and were not again permitted to
assume the habiliments of the godly until after supper, when the family
clutched its Bibles and wandered forth despairingly to evening service.
These excursions, with attendance upon the various meetings of
the young people’s societies and other church organizations,
comprised almost the sum total of the Sunday activity of our town’s
inhabitants. In recent years the young folks there appear to have gone
wholeheartedly to the Devil, and are gallivanting about the country in
automobiles, listening to radios, dancing, attending baseball games on
the Sabbath and otherwise disporting themselves in a sinful manner, but
in my youth we had to observe a very definite list of Sunday taboos, in
addition to the special don’ts laid down by the more devout families,
according to their fear of God and the fervor of their belief.
We could not play card games on Sunday. Regulation playing cards
of course, were taboo at all times in the best and most religious
families, for God, we were told, had informed the Preacher that cards
were an invention of the Devil, designed to lure true believers into
sin; but on Sunday we could not even play such games as Lotto, Old
Maid and Authors. On week days these were considered very amusing and
instructive pastimes, although in some quarters it was felt that they
caused too much laughter, but if anyone so much as thought of them on
Sunday he was headed for Hell.
The taboo against drinking was in effect every day in the week for
the godly and their children, not on account of the possible harmful
physical effects of liquor, but because God objected. And even the
Town Sot hesitated to take a drink on Sunday, for he knew that every
Preacher and every Brother and Sister would be howling to God to damn
his immortal soul and make a horrible example out of him. And how they
did love horrible examples!
No indoor games were permitted. This taboo was in force against
“Drop-the-Handkerchief,” “Puss-in-the-Corner,” “Ring-Around the Rosy,”
and “London Bridge is Falling Down;” in fact, it included everything
the Preacher could think of except games founded on the Bible. That
is, we could play games in which questions of Biblical history were
asked and answered, but they had to be conducted in a very solemn and
decorous manner. At the first laugh, or at the first question based
on the more ribald portions of the Scriptures, such as Numbers and
Deuteronomy, the game was stopped and everyone went home in disgrace.
One of my young friends who once asked what happened to Laban’s
household idol was soundly thrashed, as was another who requested a
young lady to enumerate the ingredients of Ezekiel’s bread. The curious
may learn what the Holy Prophet ate by consulting Ezekiel 4:15.
We could have no outdoor games; in many families, indeed, it was
considered irreligious to go out of doors at all except to church.
Restless boys were sometimes permitted to walk around the block, and
once in a great while to play, if they did so quietly and remained in
the back yard, where, presumably, the Lord could not see them. Anyhow,
the neighbors couldn’t.
Parties and teas were forbidden, and we could not visit on Sunday, as
a general rule, except among relatives. And such visits were usually
turned into holy sing-songs, but since most of the hymns were either
pornographic or slightly Sadistic, there were thrills galore in this
sort of thing.
Walking along the main street of the town on Sunday was a sin of the
first magnitude. Occasionally a group would obtain permission to stroll
sedately down to Old Maid’s Springs and take kodak pictures in a
refined and genteel manner, but a young man and a girl caught ambling
along Columbia street were the objects of much unfavorable comment. It
was generally agreed that they were no better than they should be, and
often a Preacher, or a Brother or Sister, would stop them and order
them to cease desecrating the Lord’s Day by such frivolous conduct.
“Go home,” they would be told, “and pray to God to forgive you.”
We could not go buggy-riding on Sunday until we were old enough to
take our hope of the hereafter in our hands and tacitly admit our
allegiance to Satan. Girls who did so and thus flaunted their sin were
ostracised by many of our best families, and were regarded as abandoned
hussies, if not scarlet women. A man had to hold a good many promissory
notes for his daughter to get away with a thing like that.
The Lord did not approve of Sunday-night suppers, and so we could not
have them. In the homes of the godly there was only a cold snack for
the evening meal. It was considered sinful to light a fire in the
cook-stove after twelve o’clock noon. One woman who moved to Farmington
from St. Louis had the brazen audacity to give formal Sunday-night
dinners, but she scandalized the town and nobody would attend but a few
Episcopalians disguised as Presbyterians. And even they could not bring
themselves to wear evening clothes. But God soon punished her; she was
so severely criticised that she finally went back to the city.
Dancing on Sunday, of course, or for that matter on any other day, was
the Sin of Sins. I was told, and until I was almost grown believed it,
that whoever danced on the Sabbath would immediately be engulfed in a
wave of Heavenly wrath, and his soul plunged into the Fires of Hell to
frizzle and fry throughout eternity.
Sunday newspapers were not considered religious, although my father
went to the Devil to the extent of buying them each Sunday and
permitting my brothers and myself to read the comic sections. Usually
we went to Pelty’s Book Store for them after church, bringing home the
St. Louis _Globe-Democrat_, the _Republic_ and the _Post-Dispatch_,
together with a horde of small boys whose parents would not permit them
to read anything on Sunday but the Bible, and who therefore came to
our house and sprawled all over the place reading the comics and the
magazine sections. My father was severely criticized for buying the
Sunday newspapers, but he persisted in his wickedness. My prayerful
uncle would not permit them in his house; indeed, all of his books but
the Bibles remained in a locked case from Saturday night to Monday
morning. But when my brothers and myself passed his home with the
Sunday papers under our arms he always stopped us, and kept us waiting
on the sidewalk for half an hour or more while he glanced at them and
eagerly devoured the news. But he would not let us come in while we had
the papers; he would meet us on the walk, and we were not old enough to
object.
My father finally became very tired of this practice, and himself went
after the papers. The first day he did this, my uncle was on his front
porch, waiting for us to come by, and he stopped my father and reached
for one of the papers. But my father would not let him have any of
them.
“No, no,” he said. “You do not believe in Sunday papers.”
And thereafter my uncle did not read our Sunday papers, although he
occasionally visited us in the afternoon and looked at them, after
expressing his sorrow at finding them in our house. Once he found his
son sprawled in our yard guffawing over the antics of the Yellow Kid
when he should have been at a meeting of the Loyal Temperance Legion,
lifting his childish voice against the Rum Demon. My uncle chased the
lad home with threats of punishment, and then himself took up the funny
section.
Baseball games were played by the ungodly on the outskirts of the town
on Sunday, but the game was frowned upon by the Preachers and the
Brothers and Sisters, who denounced it as a lure of Satan and predicted
dire spiritual tortures for the players. Small boys who attended the
games were soundly whipped, but occasionally we became so feverish
with the desire to witness a contest that we slipped away from home
and watched the game, pretending that we were going to visit relatives
and listen to hymns played on an organ. But there were always spies of
the Lord at the game to tell on us. It was this opposition to Sunday
baseball that drove my younger brother out of the Methodist Sunday
school, only a little while after I myself had abandoned the church. He
was in the class taught by Brother Benjamin Marbury, a lawyer and an
exceedingly loud and bitter antagonist of baseball. He denounced the
game before his class one day, and my brother said that he could not
see anything wrong with it. Brother Marbury stared at him sternly.
“Would Jesus Christ attend a baseball game on Sunday if He were here?”
he demanded.
My brother said he did not know, but thought He would, and Brother
Marbury immediately knelt and asked God to forgive the blasphemy.
My brother was infuriated and never went back to Sunday school. His
comment was: “What did he have to bring Jesus Christ into it for?”
2
We arose at the usual hour on Sunday morning, perhaps a little later,
and immediately after breakfast began to get ready for Sunday school.
There was hair to comb, shoes to polish in the kitchen, cravats to
tie around necks that had become enlarged and reddened by various
activities on the playing fields, and there were nickels to secrete
for the collection boxes. Worse, there were Sunday-school lessons and
Golden Texts to learn, and the catechism to memorize. Dressed in our
Sunday suits, our hair slicked moistly to our heads and Sunday-school
pamphlets in our hands, my two brothers and I went solemnly down to
Newman’s corner, turned into the unnamed street that ran past Elmwood
Seminary and then into Columbia Street and so to the Southern Methodist
church.
Ordinarily a trip downtown was a great deal of fun; we tripped each
other, poked each other in the ribs or had two or three fights _en
route_, varying with the warmth of our friendship for other boys we
met upon the way. But on Sunday we went solemnly and fearfully, first
Emmett, then myself and then Fred, according to age and stature. We
met other similar groups, arrayed as we were in their Sunday suits
and clutching their lesson pamphlets, and our greetings were subdued
and formal. We converged upon the church, and all over town the bells
tolled and the faithful marched to hear God’s intimates explain His
written word, and tell us calmly and definitely what He meant by the
most obscure passages in His Book.
We sat in church for an hour and a half listening to various versions
of the Hebraic fairy tales. In our church the Sunday-school room was
set apart from the main auditorium, but occasionally the attendance
was so large that it overflowed into the church proper. To most of
us Sunday school was torture, and I have no doubt that it is still
torture to most children. It may be that I did not learn a great deal
about the Bible in Sunday school, but I do know that it was in Sunday
school that I first began to doubt the Book. I was naturally curious
and inquisitive, and even then, young as I was, I could not swallow the
miracles of Jonah and the whale, and the idea of the virgin birth of
Jesus I considered absurd, because in common with most small-town boys
I had a very definite knowledge of the procedure employed in bringing
babies into the world. Up to the age of seven or eight I thought the
doctor brought them in his suitcase, or that they grew on bushes in the
back yard and were plucked when ripe, but after I began to loaf around
the livery stable and the Post Office building I acquired more correct
information. Nor could I believe that Noah’s Ark would have held two of
every living thing then upon the earth. But the Preachers and Brothers
and Sisters insisted that these things were literally true; they
denounced anyone who doubted and sought for symbolical meaning as an
unbeliever and a blasphemous son of Satan.
My sister, at the age of ten, was the object of special prayers and
solemn conferences because, for no other reason than that she wanted
to be contrary, she expressed a doubt of the Virgin Birth. She was in
Mrs. Judge Carter’s Sunday-school class at the time, but she did not
like Mrs. Carter and disagreed with her when she thought she could
do so without subsequent punishment. Mrs. Carter frequently told her
pupils, all little girls about eight or ten years old, of the marvelous
manner in which Christ came into the world, but she told it so vaguely
that none of them had any real understanding of it. One Sunday morning,
after Mrs. Carter had read something about the Virgin Birth, my sister
said flatly that she did not believe it.
“Don’t believe what?” asked Mrs. Carter.
“Virgin birth,” said my sister. “I think it’s foolish.”
Unfortunately, she made this observation at a time when the whole
Sunday school was quiet save for the mumbling of the catechism in
various classes, and her thin little voice reached every corner of
the room. And instantly there was a horrified silence, broken after a
moment by someone who said: “It’s that blasphemous little Asbury girl.”
Mrs. Carter was stunned; the effect upon her was the same as if God had
walked in the door and announced that Buddha, or Zoroaster, and not
Jesus Christ, was His son. She stared for a moment at this brash child
who had defied religion and, in effect, denounced the Holy Book.
“Mary!” she said terribly. “Do you realize what you have done?”
My sister’s conception of virgin birth, or of any sort of birth, was
decidedly hazy. She thought Virgin Birth meant that Christ had been
born in a stable, and she knew perfectly well that no nice child would
be born in such a place. Anyhow, she had heard so much about it that
she had become quite bored by it, and she felt it incumbent upon her
to deny it. But from Mrs. Carter’s attitude she knew that she had said
a terrible thing; at first she thought of recanting, but she looked
about and felt of herself, and when she did not see any avenging angels
entering and could find no sign that she had been stricken, she stuck
to her guns.
“Well,” she said, “I just don’t believe it.”
“Mary!” said Mrs. Carter. “Go home and pray!”
So my sister went home, but I do not think that she prayed. Mrs. Carter
and the Preacher called that afternoon and told my father and mother
what had been said and done that day in God’s house, and there was a
considerable to-do about it, both Mrs. Carter and the Preacher dropping
to their knees and praying, and insisting, that my sister pray also for
forgiveness. But my father and mother took the attitude that since my
sister did not know what she was talking about, she probably had not
sinned to any great extent. But it was a good many years before she
again had courage to express a doubt as to the Virgin Birth. And if she
goes to Heaven she will probably find that Mrs. Carter and the Preacher
have instructed St. Peter to catechize her about it, and not to admit
her until she has atoned fully for her heinous offense at the age of
ten.
3
Some of our families in which there was an unfortunate excess of girls
permitted them to have callers on Sunday afternoon, but such affairs
were conducted in a prim and prissy manner. Holiness was the motif. The
boy, if he had been a good lad all week and had done nothing to affront
God or the Preacher, was dressed in his Sunday suit, and the young
lady wore the frock that was kept in reserve for weddings, funerals
and baptizings, and those cannibalistic exercises called the Lord’s
Supper. And it was definitely understood that if a boy called on a girl
on a Sunday, he was courting her, and intended to propose marriage.
They could not talk; they must converse, and their conversation must
be on subjects both inspiring and uplifting. These bons mots that are
now known as wise cracks were frowned upon, and a repetition of them
resulted in the young gentleman being shown the door.
The piano and the phonograph, in those houses which possessed such
wonders, were under lock and key and covered over with draperies to
hide them, for it was God’s day and God wanted no foolishness. The
girl’s father sat in various strategic places about the house, moving
from one to another as his suspicions of the boy’s intentions arose and
subsided, and her mother moved solemnly to and fro in her best crinkly
silk dress. There was nothing of joy in the hearts of a boy and girl
who underwent the torture of the Sunday-afternoon call; to paraphrase
the immortal song of Casey, God had struck them out.
The first, and almost the last, young lady upon whom I called on a
Sunday afternoon lived near the waterworks, and her father and mother,
rocking solemnly upon the front porch and doubtless reflecting gloomily
upon the wickedness of the race, presented such a forbidding spectacle
that I walked four times around the block before venturing in. But at
length I did, and the then idol of my heart greeted me at the front
door. Ordinarily she would have seen me coming, and she would have
poked her head out of the window and yelled: “Hey! I’ll be out in a
minute.” Then we would have piled side by side into the lawn swing and
begun swapping trade-lasts, and the air would have been thick with
appreciative squeals and “he saids” and “she saids.” But this was
Sunday, a day given over to the glory that is religion, and so she met
me at the door with a prim and pretty curtsy. Her father gave me a
gentle but suspicious greeting, because to the religious parent every
boy thinks of a girl only in terms of seduction, and her mother stopped
her rocking chair long enough to inquire:
“Did you go to Sunday school to-day, Herbie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What was the Golden Text?” she demanded, suspiciously.