SUNDAY RECREATIONS. Will there be a Reformation?

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 119, 11 October 1902, Page 8

SUNDAY RECREATIONS. Will there be a Reformation?

WHAT is coming over the clergy ? Are they about to take a view of life from the average layman's standpoint, or have their views as to the observance of the Fourth Commandment undergone a change ? We fear that many excellent souls in Wellington shuddered when they read that cable from Adelaide telling them that Bishop Julius suggested that he might be able to do more good by playing cricket with his flock on Sunday than in preaching to them. « • * The average layman who does not object to children staying away from a close Sunday school in order that they may listen to a band on the Basin Reserve, will say, " Well done, my lord," but we are afraid that the Bishop's opinion will not be popular among many of the " unco quid." Sometimes we get a clergyman of lower rank than a bishop wbo comes out with startling innovations, and, to say truth, we feel relieved to find that the Church doesn't in all cases kill the instinct that prompts us to gather force on Sunday for the duties of the week. A Wanganui clergyman, who was more starthngly unorthodox than even Bishop Julius, recently said that he favoured the gentle practice of dogfighting on Sunday, rather than the smoking of cheap cigarettes. Mr. Cocker, who made the remark, doesn't smoke. + « * We believe that the people should have a complete change on Sundays from their usual occupations. If the hobby is choir singing let them follow it. It is good lung exercise. If they are musical enough to wrench themselves away from church service to while away a pleasant hour or so in listening to the band, which may take up a collection and so get the com that might have gone into the church box, why should anybody feel hurt enough about it to write to the papers ? If one has been driving a pen in a dismal office all week or measuring tape in a stuffy shop and wants to play cricket instead of hearing sermons, surely he, as a free subject, has a right to his opinion as to how the Fourth Commandment should be interpreted, always providing that he injures nobody else. ♦ • « Now, as the churches are very frequently guided by precedent and as it is quite likely that Bishop Julius may set an example in the direction of Sunday recreations, would it not be a welcome and wholesome change if our ministers preached the gospel of fresh air on Sundays and healthy recreation ? Because Sunday is not nowadays the day of universal gloom that many can remember it to have been. Many very excellent persons with an incurable bias call the colonials irreligious. A healthy body assists towards making a healthy mind and we expect that one must have the latter to have true religion.

We are unable to see any essential harm in wholesome open-air recreation. We believe that if the clergyman's influence is for good that it will be as gocd over the green as in the pulpit. We believe that if the '• Julius " treatment were resorted to oftener we should attain to a truer exposition of practical Christianity and we should be all the better for it. ♦ ♦ • Sunday is the only full day in the week whereon the average person can recreate himself. In reason, let him. Don't call him an atheist because he can't see through your eyes, eyes that may be oblique in vision through want of exercise in what you are pleased to term your religion. Don't pen the people up on the Sabbath as if they were expected to do penance for a week of sin. 1 1 makes some brands of latter day religion intolerable. You are doing no good by being intolerant.