Let us cull a thought or two from the utterances of George Herbert, the country parson, who was, in 1630, inducted into the parsonage of Pemberton, and who has been called the “Keble of the age which boasted of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, and Ben Jonson.” I could wish that his life (written by Izaak Walton) and his works, in prose and poetry, were in every girl’s bookcase. It is passing from the unlettered peasant woman to the cultured divine, but the quotations I will give you show how the same spirit actuates high and low, the ignorant and the learned, when, as the children of God, they express their sense of the infinite preciousness of the Sabbath. Herbert’s poem called “Sunday” is too long to quote as a whole, but you will enjoy reading some quotations from it.
“O day most calm, most bright!
The fruit of this, the next world’s bud,
Th’ endorsement of supreme delight,
Writ by a Friend, and with His blood;
The couch of time; care’s balm and bay,
The week were dark, but for thy light,
Thy torch doth show the way.
* * * *
Sundays the pillars are,