What Is Sunday Worth to Religion?
By Editor
"What Is Sunday Worth to Religion?" was the subject of a Boston Monday lecture by Rev. Joseph Cook some three weeks ago. Well, Sunday is worth just as much as any other of the secular days of the week. It is just twenty-four hours of probationary time allotted to men in which to repent, seek pardon, and prepare to meet their God in the Judgment. It is twenty-four hours of time in which the disciples of Christ may labor for their Master in the salvation of souls. It is twenty-four hours of opportunity for which all will have to render account for the manner in which the time is employed. Twenty-four hours may decide the fate of a soul; it may decide the wages of a lifetime. "The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." The friends of the "American Sabbath" (as Sunday is now boastfully styled) claim that it has gained a "great victory" in the matter of the World's Fair at Chicago. So has alcohol, according to the same authorities. The "American Sabbath" gained a "great victory" at Washington in connection with the inaugural ceremonies—and so did alcohol. During the Sunday-closing contest in Congress several prominent political schemers plastered their unsavory records with a hollow reverence for Sunday, and already they have their reward in the fulsome praise of fawning churchmen. A vote or a speech in behalf of Sunday becomes the cure-all for political corruption. And this is just what some of the "reform" satellites that dance around the Sunday orb have been counting upon for years. As far back as 1874, in a convention at Pittsburg, Dr. Robert Audley Browne uttered these prophetic words:— There is no more persistent man alive than the typical representative American office seeker. Of that class, the most of those who have not yet found whether they are for Christ or not, or who are openly decrying this movement, are ready to be its firm friends as soon as they acquire wisdom to discern the signs of the times, and are assured of its speedy success. They may pull back now at the hind axle, or scotch the wheels of the car of progress; but when they see it move, they will quickly jump in to get front seats, and avow they "always thought it was a good thing." And now that the men who were thus prophetically pictured as designing hypocrites have done the work expected of them, the self-styled reformers show their own hypocrisy by lauding the virtues of those same "typical representative office seekers." They expected to win through the scheming duplicity of politicians, and, having won, they are ready to extol that duplicity as a crowning virtue. The ex-queen of Hawaii makes quite a significant reply to the charges of Rev. Sereno Bishop that she still practices idolatry. From her printed explanation we clip the following paragraph:— Old Hawaiian customs are dear to me, even if associated with a religion that to me most certainly is gone. When good American people decorate their houses and their churches with evergreen at Christmas would it be fair to say that they are at heart Druids? And yet everybody knows that the custom of hanging boughs and twigs at Christmas originated in the idea that certain gods could only live in the boughs of trees and would perish of cold if left in the bitter winter air. Is every girl that receives, or every man that sends, a valentine open to the charge of the idolatry of ancient Rome? And yet the custom of sending what we now call valentines is distinctly pagan in its inception. As a recriminative retort, the ex-queen's parallel is pertinent, yet the observance of idolatrous customs—be they Hawaiian, German, or Roman—is idolatry; and it is none the less so because practiced by "good Americans" under the guise of Christian ceremony.