Another instance is ready at hand in the practical abandonment of the religious observance of Sunday.  To Christians Sunday is the Lord’s day, and is to be observed as such.  It is not true that an hour in the morning is the Lord’s day, and is to be given to worship, and that the rest of the day is given to us to do what we will with.  But in our own Communion do we get any strong protest in favour of the sanctity of the day?  Or are not the clergy compromising in the hope that if they surrender the greater part of the day to the world they will be able to save an hour or two for God?  But is anything actually saved by this sort of compromise?  Do we not know that the encroachments of worldliness that have narrowed down Sunday observance to an hour a day will ultimately demand that hour, that is, will deny any obligation other than the obligation of inclination?  Are we not bound to stand by the Lord’s day?  Are we to be made lax by silly talk about puritanism?  Those who talk about the “Puritan Sunday” would do well to read a little of the Medieval legislation of the Church.  Are we to keep silent in the pulpit because wealthy and influential members of the congregation want to play golf and tennis on Sunday afternoons, or children want to play ball or go to the movies?  Are we to be taken in by talk of hard work during the week and consequent need of rest?  It is no doubt well that a man should arrange his work with a view to an adequate amount of rest; but it is also well that he should rest in his own time and not in God’s.  The Lord’s day is not a day of rest.  It ought to be, and is intended to be, a very strenuous day indeed.

One could easily spend hours in pointing out where and how the Gospel standard of life has been abandoned or compromised, and the life of the Christian in consequence conformed to the world.  The result would only strengthen the position that has been already sufficiently indicated that a wholly different standard of living has been quietly substituted throughout the Western world for the standard that is contained in Holy Scripture.  Now we are either bound to be Christians or we are not; and we are not Christians solely by virtue of certain beliefs more or less loosely held.  Our Lord’s word is:  “Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.”  And the Gospel view of life is a perfectly plain one, and is as far removed from the common life of Christians to-day as it possibly can be.  The Gospel conception of the Christian life is contained first of all in our Lord’s life.  That is the perfect human life; and the New Testament optimism is well illustrated by its conviction that that life in its essential features can, with the grace of God, be imitated by man.  And by those who have approached it in this spirit of optimism it has been found imitable.  Innumerable men and women have lived the Christian life in the past and are living it in the present.  To-day the possibility of living the Christian life,