Lady Customer: "My little boy wishes for a Noah's Ark. Have you one?"
Toyman: "No, M'um, no. We've given up keeping Noah's Harks since the School Boards come in. They was considered too denominational, M'um!"
As for the keeping of Sunday, Punch eulogizes Canon Basil Wilberforce for encouraging Sunday bands, and contrasts his tolerance with the attitude of a Dr. Watts, of Belfast, who objected to Sunday bathing: "It was not necessary for a man to bath himself every morning. He did not see, therefore, why it was necessary to open public baths on the Sabbath morning." The Sunday opening of the picture galleries at the Royal Manchester Institution proved a conspicuous success in 1880. Those who opposed the experiment had been, if not silenced, confuted, and Punch entreated London to follow this excellent lead and not stand last in the Sunday Race between Public House and Public Gallery.
So when the Tay Bridge disaster was regarded by the Sabbatarian zealots as a direct judgment on Sunday travelling, Punch dealt with them as they deserved:—
One of these self-sufficient judges of judgments, and complacent dealers out of denunciations, converting the awful catastrophe triumphantly to the account of his own black and bitter creed—in which the Almighty figures as a sort of Ashantee Fetish, to be propitiated by death and destruction—has no hesitation in putting his finger on its immediate cause. Referring to the imprisoned passengers—men, women, and little children—many of them known to have been on their way to or from errands of friendship, mercy and family affection—he asks whether it was not "awful to think" that—
"They had been carried away when many of them must have known that they were transgressing the law of God."
It might do this gentleman some good to reflect that it is possible to be "carried away" in another fashion, and to transgress a great law of God—"Judge not that ye be not judged," in a more questionable manner. To see the professing minister of a religion, of whose virtues one of its leading Apostles has declared charity the greatest, swept off his narrow line of literal sectarianism in a hurricane of bitter bigotry, is suggestive of reflections which, if not exactly "awful," are neither agreeable nor edifying.
Sunday Pastime and Sunday Closing
In the lines on "Our Sunday—down East"—permission to include which in the programme of any Sabbatarian Penny Reading was freely granted by Punch—he writes:—
Which is the day that should be blest,
And to the weary, work-opprest,
Bring wholesome pleasure, peace, and rest?