of
the dignity of labor, rest as discount upon capital, rest for
intelligence, rest for compensation, rest for domestic happiness, rest
for pious culture. The seventh day of every week should be consecrated
to cessation from labor and devoted to physical and mental repose. It
should not be a day of recreation to be spent in riotous living and in
brawls, but a day peaceful, in harmony with the institutions of
religion and the dominant sentiment of the country. Our fathers
consecrated the Sabbath, and had you the patience to hear and I, the
time to read from Franklin, from Jefferson, from Washington, touching
the Sabbath, in recognition of it as indispensable to the welfare of
our body politic, you would be confirmed in this great truth. The
danger to-day is that we are becoming un-American in cutting loose
from the Sabbath-day as a day of rest and of worship. I cannot invoke
the civil law to do more than to say that it shall be a day of rest. I
cannot invoke the civil law to say that that man shall worship here or
worship there, or worship at all, but I can invoke the civil law to
say that it shall be a non-secular day; not a day for the transaction
of business, but a day on which the laboring man shall walk out under
God's free skies and say: This is my day, the day of a freeman.
[Applause.] The tendency is to transplant a European Sabbath here; the
German with his lager, and the Frenchman with his wine, and the
Irishman with his shillalah. [Laughter.] No, no, gentlemen, stay on
the other side of the great deep. We don't want these things or this
day on this side of the broad Atlantic.

There is another attribute that belongs to the true American
citizen--the recognition of Christianity as the religion of our
country. Webster, our greatest expounder of constitutional law, did
not hesitate to declare that Christianity--not Methodist Christianity,
not Roman Catholic Christianity, not Presbyterian Christianity--but
Christianity as taught by the four Evangelists, is the recognized
religion of this land. Recognized how far? So far that its ethics
shall be embodied in our constitutional and statutory law; so far that
its teachings of the brotherhood of mankind shall be accepted; so far
that its lessons of fraternity, equality, justice; and mercy shall be
incorporated in the law of society. Those beautiful moralities that
fell from the lips of the divine Son of God have been incorporated in
the laws of the land, and that wit