SUNDAY OBSERVANCE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 905, 24 February 1930, Page 14

SUNDAY OBSERVANCE

ANGLICAN VICAR DEFINES TERM “SABBATH” NOT CHRISTIAN SUNDAY "Sunday is first of all a day for -worship. All the -work -we do not do and all the picnics we do not go to, put together and multiplied many times, will not make up for the services we do not attend. The obligation to attend public worship on Sunday is a duty laid upon all who profess and call themselves Christians. Rest and recreation have their claims, too.” These remarks are from the pen of the Rev. A. Russell Allerton, vicar of St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, Freeman's Bay. They appear in his parish magazine for February. “The question of Sunday observance is always cropping up, and people who ought to know better are so busy arguing about what they ought not to do that they forget all about what they ought to do,” Father Allerton says. -The Christian Sunday is not the Jewish Sabbath. Sunday is a festival —a weekly Easter. Even the Sundays in Lent are festivals and not counted in the forty days of Lent.' "Some of the distaste for public worship arises, I am sure, from being associated in the past with Sabbartarian practices that are more in accord with the observance of Friday than Sunday,” the vicar observes. "Now, let us face this obligation of Sunday worship. Someone said to me that St. Thomas’s could never be full because of its situation. It every Anglican in the parish came only once on a Sunday the church would be packed. This is expecting too much, perhaps, because so many who call themselves Anglicans are like that native of Palestine w ho claimed to be a Christian because he ate pork and drank whisky, and therefore clearly was neither a Jew r.or a Mohammedan. I am not implying that our lapsed Anglicans drink whisky, but their only claim to be Anglicans seems to be that they are not anything else. But if only our own folk came regularly St. Thomas's would be comfortably full and all torts of developments would be possible, instead of struggling to keep going.”