Of course, the vote of the consistory of Eastern Prussia was eventually quashed, and its members disciplined.  But the publicity given to the affair served to call the attention of the people at large to the emperor’s disregard of the laws which he himself had caused to be enacted.  Previous to his reign, Sunday had been looked upon as a day of recreation, revelry, and festivity throughout Germany.

In the days of the old emperor all the finest performances of the court theatres were reserved for Sunday, the principal state banquets took place on that day, as well as the imperial hunting parties and battues.  Among the bourgeoisie, dances, balls and picnics were the order of the Lord’s Day, while the lower classes thronged the beer gardens and the beer halls that constitute so important a feature of German life.  Regattas, parades, race-meetings, and popular entertainments and festivals of one kind or another, were, in fact, all reserved for Sunday.

All this was changed when the emperor came to the throne, and among the earliest laws enacted on his initiative, were those to which the Governor of Westphalia called attention in the proclamation just described, and which prohibited every form of revelry on the Sabbath.  For instance, a few months after William’s accession he was invited by the Berlin Yacht Club to attend the annual regatta, which was to take place on the following Sunday morning, but he declined on the ground that it would prevent his going to church, and when the committee offered to postpone the races until the afternoon he declared that his principles would not permit him to regard Sunday as a day to be devoted to regattas, and analogous forms of popular entertainment.  It must be explained that he was at the time strongly imbued with the evangelistic views which he had derived from his wife’s aunt, the American Countess of Waldersee, and from her protege, ex-Court Chaplain Stoecker, who combined with his strict and Puritanical views on the subject of the Sabbath, the most intense animosity towards the Jews, and a virulent hatred for the late Emperor Frederick.

This strange divine, so famous for many years as the leader of the so-called “Juedenhetz” movement, is one of the most displeasing figures in German public life, and Emperor William, who has long since turned his back upon him, and dismissed him from his court chaplaincy, must bitterly regret that he ever accorded him any favor or intimacy, and permitted himself to be influenced by his views.  How is it possible to speak with any patience of a minister of the Church who, in a weekly paper, “The Ecclesiastical Review,” of December 10, 1887, actually had the audacity to write in an editorial article signed with his name the following cruel sentence?  “Let us pray every day and every hour for our royal family, and in particular for the Old Man (the old kaiser) and for the Young Man (the present emperor) of this race of heroes.  May God in His mercy grant that the terrible punishment which has overtaken the sick Prince Frederick (the late Emperor Frederick) bear fruit, and may it bring resignation to his mind, and peace to his conscience.”