currence of baseball games and
Sunday racing and evening theatres? How far is all this demoralizing to
our better life? What would Christ say, do you think? Even supposing he
would advise this church to take and read the big Sunday daily sent in
on the special Sunday train, that keeps a small army of men at work and
away from all Sunday privileges; even supposing he would say it was all
right to sell fruit and cigars and meat on Sunday, and perfectly proper
for church members to buy those things on that day, what would Christ
say was the real meaning and purpose of this day in the thought of the
Divine Creator when he made the day for man?

"I cannot conceive that he would say anything else than this to the
people of this town and this church: He would say it was our duty to
make this day different from all other days in the two particulars of
rest and worship. He would say that we owe it to the Father of our souls
in common gratitude for his mighty love toward us that we spend the day
in ways pleasing to him. He would say that the wonderful civilization of
our times should study how to make this day a true rest day to the
workingman of the world, and that all unnecessary carrying of passengers
or merchandise should stop, so as to give all men, if possible, every
seven days, one whole day of rest and communion with something better
than the things that perish with the using. He would say that the Church
and the church-member and the Christian everywhere should do all in his
power to make the day a glad, powerful, useful, restful, anticipated
twenty-four hours, looked forward to with pleasant longing by little
children and laboring men and railroad men and street-car men as the one
day of all the week, the happiest and best because different in its use.
And so different that when Monday's toil begins the man feels refreshed
in body and in soul because he has paused a little while in the mad
whirl of his struggle for bread or fame, and has fellow-shipped with
heavenly things, and heard something diviner than the Jangling discords
of this narrow, selfish earth.

"If this thought of Sunday is bigotry or narrowness, then I stand
convicted as a bigot living outside of the nineteenth century. But I am
not concerned about that. What I am concerned about is Christ's thought
of this day. If I understand his spirit right I believe he would say
what I have said. He would say that it is not a right use of this day
for the men and w