Sabbatarians

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 47, 21 November 1907, Page 9

Sabbatarians

The Rev. JDr. .Newman Hall was once holidaying in Scotland. One Sunday he was proceeding -to preach in a church in lidinb'urgh, and, happening to pass St. Giles's (Protestant) .Cathedral, he stepped just ' inside "the west door and took a glance at the beautiful interior. The beadle^ - gorgeously upholstered in his Sunday array, pounced upon him. 'It is shameful ■', said the official, ' tEat a clergyman should set the example of breaking the Sabbath by going round to see the churohes of the city '. Dr. Hall ' worked off ' his .indignation in a "letter to- the press, which concluded as follows : ' I have since been told that this s pious guardian of the Sabbath received three-pence for every visitor to St. Giles's on week-days ! ' A fan better, though somewhat unreasoning type-of the rigid Sabbatarian was me aged dame -who was deeply scandalised at seeing the late Queen Victoria driving to church .from Balmoral on a Sunday. ' But ', objected" a loyal subject in defence, ' did not the Lord and His Apostles pluck ears of wheat on the SaWbuth day ? ' 1 Aweel; they did ', admitted' the stem old. dame, ' but JL think nae better o' em for that.' - There is, indeed, abundant need for protest against the wholesale desecration of " the Sunday by people who, like the giddy merrymakers of San Francisco in the days of Artemus Ward, 'remembered the Sabbath-day, to keep it jolly '. But little good is* after all, effected by confusing the Christian Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath "(Saturday). Arid, strangely enough, some of the worst forms of desecration of the Day of the New Dispensation are serenely perpetrated by rigid Sabbatarians. Violent political harangues, frantic • electioneering appeals to sectarian passion, and" the scandals "of typical. Orange sermons, are, we ween, far greater, outrages on the sanctity of the Lord^s- Day than kickiing a football or drawing a flounder from saltwater or a speckled trout froiri, fresli. This was the substance- of an article which the Melbourne ' Argus ' recently published in reply to a protest by the Presbyterian Moderator and others against a concert and collection on Hospital Sunday, which realised £250 for the Melbourne Hospital. ' Last Sunday ', says the article in conclusion," a brass band, played on the Melbourne Cricket- Ground, and Collections for the hospitals were . received. A year or- two ago brass bands were ■ playing in city churches, and" inflammatory political speeches Were .being delivered— speeches infinitely more disturb- . ing to devotion than an elephant with a collection-box.'

And so say all of us who 'read the reports o! • the 1 inflammatory . political speeches ' referred to by "the ' Argus '. X