“The paper!” said he, emphatically.
I yielded, without a word.
“Now, if you want to read on Sunday,” said he, “go into the house and learn the Collect for the third Sunday after Trinity. And never let me see a boy of your age reading the paper again.”
“Not on week-days?” said I.
“No, never!” he replied, and, as he walked away, he scanned the Stock Exchange quotations with a stern and unrelenting face.
I do not want to argue about the justice of this, for now that I am a little older, the after effect, though not what my father expected, has proved quite admirable. If the newspaper was not true enough to read on week-days, let alone Sundays, I came to the conclusion that it must be very full of lies indeed. And all this has been very helpful to me ever since. I think of it now as I open my daily paper in the morning, and I thank my father for it from the bottom of my heart. It has saved me a deal of unnecessary credulity.
I remember, too, that all games—all games but chess—were strictly forbidden. That also has left an impression on my mind—an ineffaceable impression about the game of chess. It seems a very stern game to me—a game rigid in its expression of the truth. The King and Queen are always real people, moving—far be it from me to allude to Royalty—in straightened paths; the Queen impulsively, the King in staid dignity, one step at a time. I always behold the Knight as one, erratic and Quixotic in all he does; the Bishop swift and to the point, thereby connecting himself in my mind with the days when the Bishops went out to war and brought the Grace of God with them on to the battlefield, rather than with the Bishops of to-day, who keep the Grace of God at home.
So I think of the game of Chess—the only game we were ever allowed to play on Sunday—the game my father loved so well above all others.
I don’t know what it is about the observance of the Sabbath, but to me it seems a beautiful idea, like a beautiful bell; yet a bell that has been cracked and rings with a strange, false, unmeaning note. No one seems to be able to get the true tone of it. Heaven knows they ring it enough. The Church and such followers of the Church as my father are always pealing its message for the world to hear; yet I wonder how many people detect in it the sound of that discordant note of hypocrisy.
Nevertheless, there is something grand in that conception of One creating a vast universe in six days or six ages—whichever you will—and resting at His ease upon the seventh. Nor is it less grand to work throughout a common week, making a home, and on the Sabbath to cease from labour. The whole world is agreed that that day of rest is needed; but are they to lay down a law that what is rest for one man is rest for another?