We Catholics say that the Sunday is like other holidays of obligation, of the same enactment, and on the some footing with them—i.e., they are all instituted by command of the church. Now, with the Sunday, as well as with the other church festivals of obligation, comes the duty of hearing Mass and refraining from servile labor; but the law of the church ceases at that point, and “where there is no law there is no transgression.” The Catholic believes the other days ordered by the church to be observed just as binding as Sunday; but it never enters his head to attempt to coerce Protestants either into the same belief or observance. His
Protestant friend says to him in effect: “I have a very tender conscience touching the observance of this day. Your cheerfulness interferes with my devotional feelings; your Sunday recreations, walks, visits, and travel scandalize me, and offer a bad example to my rising family. On last Sunday morning yourself and family rode out in the horse-cars to the park; in the afternoon you entertained a houseful of visitors, during which time you, with the flute, accompanied your daughter on the piano. The Sunday previous you took the train for an adjoining city. The Sunday papers are frequently taken at your house. You write, post, receive, and read letters as unconcernedly on the Lord’s day as though it were the middle of the week. When we had the power you would have been firstly fined, then whipped, and for stubborn persistence put to death for this; but in these degenerate days all I can do is to put every legal and social obstruction in your way that our decaying numbers but ever persistent determination will enable us to do. Alas for the days that are gone!”
Now, with the parents on either side we have little to do. The mind of the Catholic is made up; his conscience is informed from the precepts and instructions of the church; and we have no desire to change his views or practice in the premises. And, in the case of his opponent, there are few tasks so hopelessly wanting in results as that of convincing a man against his will; as that of trying to surmount religious prejudice in the adult. But we put it to fair reason, to common sense, to the community (which has a manifest interest that its members shall be
under the influence of some religion, and not utter infidels), to answer: In which of the two families exists the stronger likelihood that the children will grow up stanch and ardent believers in religion? Will any one tell us that it will be in that in which a dark, overshadowing pall, under the name of piety, was made “to press the life from out young hearts”; in which every thoughtless, merry, or exuberant word or act of theirs was represented as sin “deserving God’s wrath and curse for ever”; in which no memory of youth connected with religion can be other than sombre, dismal, and remorseful? Or will it be in the Catholic family, where the child is taught, not merely in words, but in fact, that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”; where, as he grows up, religious observance constantly appeals to him as a privilege, not as an infliction; where cheerfulness, mirth, and jollity are
by no means considered hostile to, but rather the concomitants of, true religion; and where no day of the week is definitely consecrated to unnatural gloom and false (because enforced, and consequently hypocritical) devotion?
The answer is plain. Statistics of the result, with children brought up under each set of influences, bear us triumphantly out; and, in fine, thankful as we are for the daily and yearly decrease in numbers and influence of those who maintain this rigorous observance of the Sunday, we shall be still better pleased, and it will be a happy day for this and the other English-speaking peoples among whom they ever existed, when the quibbling, narrow-minded, and sophistical principles and practices represented by such persons shall have been entirely stamped out beneath the onward march of tolerance and Christian charity.
[152] Not having had an opportunity of extensive travel in Scotland, we cannot speak of anything but Edinburgh and Glasgow; but on the few Sundays that we passed there, if there was any more specific and noticeable observance of the day than by more copious drinking, we failed to see it.
THE ETERNAL YEARS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”