THE MISUSE OF SUNDAY

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4545, 31 March 1923, Page 2

THE MISUSE OF SUNDAY

THE DRIFT TO PLEASURE, In his ‘‘hot-point talk” preceding the” sermon in one of the Wellington churches last Sunday night the minister dealt trenchantly with the popular misuse of Sunday. The preacher said he was filled with alarm at the increasing desecration of the day of rest. A fair test of any man's quality was how does he spend the Lord's Day? If in his life there was no reverence, no worship, no real consciousness of God, he was lop-sided and disproportionate. It was a shallow or callous soul that never worshipped. “The drift from God’s house to pleasure on Sunday,” continued the speaker, *'is ominous, and boded ill for the nation. The rigid Sabbath qf our fathers, with its austerities and prohibitions, has passed away for ever How the young disliked it I But the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Sport, pleasure, idleness, on God’s day can mean nothing else than ultimate decay of moral fibre. ‘ The nations that forget God are turned into hell,’ not a hell of final fire, but one of earthly calamity and loss. Working men (and that should include all, for an idler takes up too much room) should be alarmed less the Continental Sunday be introduced here, for that would mean seven days of toil every week for many. : Could not our politicians occupy their Sunday nights in any better way than in discussing party politics, with all its bitterness and antagonisms ? Rapid transit, by the multiplication of motor-cars, and the week-end habit, are perilous to the morals of our country. Has God no claim on the lives of men ? His benefits are lavished upon them freely day by day, and yet they ignore or flout His expressed will. ‘Fpresake not the assembling of yourselves together as the manner of some is.’ Gardening, house repairs, unnecessary duties on the Lord’s day mean poverty of soul, dishonour to God, irreverence, and social injury. Any man who ponders earnestly the problems of life will frequent the house of God to get light on them from God’s word. The attitude of the modern mind towards sacred things is frivolous, if not profane. To treat worship with flippancy, purity with a sneer, and Christianity with jocose satire, is to betray a shat- 1 lowness of mind and a depravity of soul which prophesy national decay. Give the big things of life and eternity their true place and value. When over seventy Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to a friend, describing a little village service he had attended the previous Sunday, and added: ‘There is a little plant called reverence in a corner of my soul’s garden which I like to have watered about once a week. We shall be wise if we jealously guard the sanctity bf the Lord’s Day, with its rest, worship, and general religious observance; for “‘A Sabbath well spent , I Brings a week of content,’” I