Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · April 21, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 16

An additional $50,000 has been appropriated for the American Museum of Natural History on condition that it be open to the public Sunday afternoons and two evenings each week. The Mail and Express thus bewails this action:—

“The condition requiring the Museum to be kept open on Sunday afternoons is pernicious in tendency and the offspring of an unwise and unsound public policy. The Sabbath of Continental Europe, with its fetes, its theaters and operas, its parades and concerts, its public galleries and varied places of general entertainment, is a very different day from the Sabbath contemplated and preserved under American institutions. Here it is a day of consecrated rest and worship. There it is a day devoted to frivolity and hilarity, to say nothing of the baser forms of vice which its customs generate and foster. Any step which tends to change the sacred character of the day with us is a step in the wrong direction. This condition of the additional appropriation does this very thing; it tends to secularize the Christian Sabbath, and it is to be deplored that it has received legislative sanction. It would have been practicable to get the appropriation without this wretched selling of Sunday. Has it got to this, that Christian institutions will be obliterated for money?”