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Sunday should be a day of gladness, and of light and beauty, for it is then that the forthright religionist is closest to his God, and when he is, if ever, in communion with the Holy Spirit and presumably receives instruction with which to confound the wicked during the ensuing week. But in small communities which suffer from the blight of religion it never is, and when I was a boy in Farmington Sunday was a day of dreadful gloom; over everything hung an atmosphere of morbid fear and dejection. In the morning the whole town donned its Sunday suit, almost always black and funereal and depressing, and therefore becoming to religious practice, and trudged sorrowfully and solemnly to Sunday School and to church, there to wail doleful hymns and hear an unlearned man “measure with words the immeasurable and sink the string of thought into the fathomless;” and beseech the Lord upon the universal prayer theme of “gimme.” Then the village marched, in mournful cadence, back home for Sunday dinner. But before the meal was eaten the juvenile members of the religious household were commanded to remove their sabbath raiment, and were not again permitted to assume the habiliments of the godly until after supper, when the family clutched its Bibles and wandered forth despairingly to evening service.
These excursions, with attendance upon the various meetings of the young people’s societies and other church organizations, comprised almost the sum total of the Sunday activity of our town’s inhabitants. In recent years the young folks there appear to have gone wholeheartedly to the Devil, and are gallivanting about the country in automobiles, listening to radios, dancing, attending baseball games on the Sabbath and otherwise disporting themselves in a sinful manner, but in my youth we had to observe a very definite list of Sunday taboos, in addition to the special don’ts laid down by the more devout families, according to their fear of God and the fervor of their belief.
We could not play card games on Sunday. Regulation playing cards of course, were taboo at all times in the best and most religious families, for God, we were told, had informed the Preacher that cards were an invention of the Devil, designed to lure true believers into sin; but on Sunday we could not even play such games as Lotto, Old Maid and Authors. On week days these were considered very amusing and instructive pastimes, although in some quarters it was felt that they caused too much laughter, but if anyone so much as thought of them on Sunday he was headed for Hell.
The taboo against drinking was in effect every day in the week for the godly and their children, not on account of the possible harmful physical effects of liquor, but because God objected. And even the Town Sot hesitated to take a drink on Sunday, for he knew that every Preacher and every Brother and Sister would be howling to God to damn his immortal soul and make a horrible example out of him. And how they did love horrible examples!
No indoor games were permitted. This taboo was in force against “Drop-the-Handkerchief,” “Puss-in-the-Corner,” “Ring-Around the Rosy,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down;” in fact, it included everything the Preacher could think of except games founded on the Bible. That is, we could play games in which questions of Biblical history were asked and answered, but they had to be conducted in a very solemn and decorous manner. At the first laugh, or at the first question based on the more ribald portions of the Scriptures, such as Numbers and Deuteronomy, the game was stopped and everyone went home in disgrace. One of my young friends who once asked what happened to Laban’s household idol was soundly thrashed, as was another who requested a young lady to enumerate the ingredients of Ezekiel’s bread. The curious may learn what the Holy Prophet ate by consulting Ezekiel 4:15.
We could have no outdoor games; in many families, indeed, it was considered irreligious to go out of doors at all except to church. Restless boys were sometimes permitted to walk around the block, and once in a great while to play, if they did so quietly and remained in the back yard, where, presumably, the Lord could not see them. Anyhow, the neighbors couldn’t.
Parties and teas were forbidden, and we could not visit on Sunday, as a general rule, except among relatives. And such visits were usually turned into holy sing-songs, but since most of the hymns were either pornographic or slightly Sadistic, there were thrills galore in this sort of thing.
Walking along the main street of the town on Sunday was a sin of the first magnitude. Occasionally a group would obtain permission to stroll sedately down to Old Maid’s Springs and take kodak pictures in a refined and genteel manner, but a young man and a girl caught ambling along Columbia street were the objects of much unfavorable comment. It was generally agreed that they were no better than they should be, and often a Preacher, or a Brother or Sister, would stop them and order them to cease desecrating the Lord’s Day by such frivolous conduct.
“Go home,” they would be told, “and pray to God to forgive you.”
We could not go buggy-riding on Sunday until we were old enough to take our hope of the hereafter in our hands and tacitly admit our allegiance to Satan. Girls who did so and thus flaunted their sin were ostracised by many of our best families, and were regarded as abandoned hussies, if not scarlet women. A man had to hold a good many promissory notes for his daughter to get away with a thing like that.
The Lord did not approve of Sunday-night suppers, and so we could not have them. In the homes of the godly there was only a cold snack for the evening meal. It was considered sinful to light a fire in the cook-stove after twelve o’clock noon. One woman who moved to Farmington from St. Louis had the brazen audacity to give formal Sunday-night dinners, but she scandalized the town and nobody would attend but a few Episcopalians disguised as Presbyterians. And even they could not bring themselves to wear evening clothes. But God soon punished her; she was so severely criticised that she finally went back to the city.
Dancing on Sunday, of course, or for that matter on any other day, was the Sin of Sins. I was told, and until I was almost grown believed it, that whoever danced on the Sabbath would immediately be engulfed in a wave of Heavenly wrath, and his soul plunged into the Fires of Hell to frizzle and fry throughout eternity.
Sunday newspapers were not considered religious, although my father went to the Devil to the extent of buying them each Sunday and permitting my brothers and myself to read the comic sections. Usually we went to Pelty’s Book Store for them after church, bringing home the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Republic and the Post-Dispatch, together with a horde of small boys whose parents would not permit them to read anything on Sunday but the Bible, and who therefore came to our house and sprawled all over the place reading the comics and the magazine sections. My father was severely criticized for buying the Sunday newspapers, but he persisted in his wickedness. My prayerful uncle would not permit them in his house; indeed, all of his books but the Bibles remained in a locked case from Saturday night to Monday morning. But when my brothers and myself passed his home with the Sunday papers under our arms he always stopped us, and kept us waiting on the sidewalk for half an hour or more while he glanced at them and eagerly devoured the news. But he would not let us come in while we had the papers; he would meet us on the walk, and we were not old enough to object.
My father finally became very tired of this practice, and himself went after the papers. The first day he did this, my uncle was on his front porch, waiting for us to come by, and he stopped my father and reached for one of the papers. But my father would not let him have any of them.
“No, no,” he said. “You do not believe in Sunday papers.”
And thereafter my uncle did not read our Sunday papers, although he occasionally visited us in the afternoon and looked at them, after expressing his sorrow at finding them in our house. Once he found his son sprawled in our yard guffawing over the antics of the Yellow Kid when he should have been at a meeting of the Loyal Temperance Legion, lifting his childish voice against the Rum Demon. My uncle chased the lad home with threats of punishment, and then himself took up the funny section.
Baseball games were played by the ungodly on the outskirts of the town on Sunday, but the game was frowned upon by the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters, who denounced it as a lure of Satan and predicted dire spiritual tortures for the players. Small boys who attended the games were soundly whipped, but occasionally we became so feverish with the desire to witness a contest that we slipped away from home and watched the game, pretending that we were going to visit relatives and listen to hymns played on an organ. But there were always spies of the Lord at the game to tell on us. It was this opposition to Sunday baseball that drove my younger brother out of the Methodist Sunday school, only a little while after I myself had abandoned the church. He was in the class taught by Brother Benjamin Marbury, a lawyer and an exceedingly loud and bitter antagonist of baseball. He denounced the game before his class one day, and my brother said that he could not see anything wrong with it. Brother Marbury stared at him sternly.
“Would Jesus Christ attend a baseball game on Sunday if He were here?” he demanded.
My brother said he did not know, but thought He would, and Brother Marbury immediately knelt and asked God to forgive the blasphemy. My brother was infuriated and never went back to Sunday school. His comment was: “What did he have to bring Jesus Christ into it for?”