ON THE SEVENTH DAY
Sir,-May I, as a sympathiser with the Lord’s Day Observance Society, comment on some points made in your editorial of July 20? The Society’s protests against the Duke’s Sunday polo have, it seems to me, been made regretfully rather than in waspish anger, and can hardly be considered formidable enough to intimidate any opposition, It would be truer to say that the protests have been reported only because they appear as laughably anachronistic as Lord Dowling’s belief in fairies, Further, can the Society rightly be held to confuse one aspect of religious observance with religion itself because it defends the Commandment‘ which, of all the Ten, seems to them most jeopardised by the Duke’s example? And is their temper necessarily authoritarian because they measure Sunday activities against the Commandment to keep Suncay as a day of rest and worship? You imply that Christian behaviour does not perforce include so strict a code; yet Jesus, while condemning the rigidity which would not allow for individual emer-
gency, recommended the Ten Commandments as a moral code to a young man who came to Him for advice. It requires better grounds’ than mere expediency, convenience or inclination to justify the. discarding of one of the ‘ten principles which for centuries have constituted the basis of Western law and morality. Nor is it enough to point the example of the European countries, where "true religion" goes hand in hand not only with Sunday recreation but also with legalised prostitution. The Society believes that no motive short of obedience to a divine command is adequate to ensure the weekly pause for rest and worship, needed as much these days as ever; that even royalty are subject to the divinely-endorsed Ten Commandments; that it is a Christian duty to fight against their reduction to the Nine or Eight; and that therefore the example of the Duke in the whittling-down process is to be deplored.
D. A.
HOGG
(Te Awamutu)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 888, 10 August 1956, Page 5
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327ON THE SEVENTH DAY New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 888, 10 August 1956, Page 5
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