THE NEW ENGLAND SUNDAY.
By Editor
THE Christian Union has been called to account by some orthodox defenders of the faith for telling tales out of school in its portraiture of the New England Sabbath, and one misguided contributor in the Chicago Advance even undertakes to treat the Christian Union as an indorser and approver of the practice which it described, and which it distinctly disavowed approving. A correspondent, moved, possibly, by one of these criticisms upon our declaration that the Puritan Sabbath was not going but gone, writes us the following account of the way in which Boston observed its Sunday during the last summer season:— “If we turn to see what other attractions we can find to make the Sunday pass pleasantly to the non-church-goer, we shall find a long list of them. In fact, a number of columns of the Sunday Herald are taken up with the places that one may visit on that day. If you would go to Nantasket Beach, the Coney Island of Boston, we shall find that the boats make nine trips each way, and the attractions are an illumination of the Café grounds, a concert by a celebrated military band, and, of course, everything you wish to eat and drink. To Strawberry Hill, another port of Nantasket, we find the boats run six times each way. The Melville Gardens are open, and the Nantasket boats stop to land passengers; and a clam-bake dinner twice a day, at twelve and four, tempts the epicure. At other beaches or gardens in or about the city, the Germania, or the American Brass Band of Providence, or the Medford, or the Salem Brass Band, do their best to entertain the people; and what private enterprise may fail to do, the city itself will help to make up by music at its own expense. The steamer ‘Empire State,’ an excursion boat, all the summer, has, of course, its list of peculiar attractions for Sunday, calling special attention to Captain Boyton, who will display his wonderful aquatic agility. The steamer ‘Nahant,’ for Nahant, runs three times the Sunday, and makes one of these trips an excursion upon the blue Atlantic. Two sacred concerts were advertised at Forest Gardens on Sunday afternoon, from three to five and from eight to ten. Park Garden also advertised a ‘Grand Concert,’ avoiding the hypocrisy of calling it ‘sacred,’ in the evening. Oakland Garden presented the same attractions. Very likely we have omitted some of the excursions; in fact, another comes to mind,—one to Long Island and Lovell’s Grove. “If we look over the various time-tables of the railroads leading out of the city to see where we can go by land, we shall find all of them running the Sunday trains. Of course the Sound boat-lines are coming in Sunday morning, but now we find the Sound boats are going out Sunday evening, and it promises to be a permanent arrangement. To the towns twelve and fifteen miles out we find three or four trains each way during the day; and, what seems strange, one of the conductors on one of these Sunday trains told me he got no extra pay for his Sunday work. Some of the horse-car lines running to the beaches have as many as a dozen trains a day on Sunday. “One of the Sunday excursions by water was of such a peculiar character that it deserves special notice. It was an excursion to Plymouth, to visit, among other places of interest, the graves where lie the bodies of the Pilgrim settlers. Could those who went upon that hill have had the faintest idea of the manner in which the Pilgrims kept their Sunday? If so, would they have dared to go there on such a day? The Pilgrims’ bones or dust must have been stirred in their graves. It was certainly not a bit short of insulting to their memories to go there as these excursionists did and when they did. Nothing could possibly have been more out of place than such a visit. “It seems just now as if the riders upon bicycles timed their advent into the suburban villages on Sunday morning on purpose to meet the people coming out of the churches. Coming out of one of these churches we encountered a party of six of these blue-stocking-legged young men rolling over the road on these machines.” It is an ostrich piety which shuts its eyes and refuses to see the dangers which threaten. With that kind of piety we will have no part nor lot whatsoever. It is at the head-quarters of Puritanism that the Puritan Sabbath is in ruins. The Sunday excursions are more numerous, in proportion to the population, out of the city of Boston than they are out of the city of New York. The definition of the Sabbath as a day in which men are to be “taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of worship, and in the duties of necessity and mercy,” is buried in a deeper grave in New England than in the Empire State. To refuse to see this fact—to go quietly to church with your wife on your arm and your hymn book in your hand, whilst in your hearing the hoot and shriek of the locomotive and the steamboat mingle discordantly with the chimes of the church bells, and in your sight men slink down the side-streets to lounge in neighboring grog-shops, or openly resort by thousands to the Sunday excursion train or steamboat—and then to be indignant because a neighbor with clearer eyes beholds the evil and describes it, is but a sorry way of serving either the day or its Maker. The Puritan Sabbath, we repeat, is not going, it is gone; and the business of American churches to-day is not to re-instate the ruined observances of their fathers, but to search the Scriptures, and to learn, if they can, the nature and spirit of the day of the Lord, as indicated in Old Testament law and yet more clearly in the New Testament teachings, and then to provide for its preservation and its larger fruitfulness by methods accordant with the spirit and exigencies of the nineteenth century.—Christian Union, Oct. 15.