“You are only partly right.  New England character and history are the result of a wide-spread system of influences of which the Sabbath day was the type—­and not only so, but the grand motive power.  Almost every cause which has worked benignly among us has received its inspiration and impulse largely from this One Solitary Day of the week.

“It is true that all the vegetable growths that we see about us here depend upon a great variety of causes; but there is one cause that is the condition of power in every other, and that is the Sun!  And so, many as have been the influences working at New England character, Sunday has been a generic and multiplex force, inspiring and directing all others.  It is indeed the Sun’s day.

“It is a little singular that, borrowing the name from the heathen calendar, it should have tallied so well with the Scripture name, the Lord’s day—­that Lord who was the Morning Star in early day, and at length the Sun of Righteousness!

“The Jews called it the Sabbath—­a day of rest.  Modern Christians call it the Sun’s day, or the day of light, warmth, and growth.  If this seems fanciful so far as the names of the day are concerned, it is strikingly characteristic of the real spirit of the two days, in the ancient and modern dispensation.  I doubt if the old Jews ever kept a Sabbath religiously, as we understand that term.  Indeed, I suspect there was not yet a religious strength in that national character that could hold up religious feeling without the help of social and even physical adjuvants.  Their religious days were either fasts or like our Thanksgiving days.  But the higher and richer moral nature which has been developed by Christianity enables communities to sustain one day in seven upon a high spiritual plane, with the need of but very little social help, and without the feasting element at all.”

“That may be very well for a few saints like you and me, Doctor, but it is too high for the majority of men.  Common people find the strict Sundays a great annoyance, and clandestinely set them aside.”

“I doubt it.  There are a few in every society that live by their sensuous nature.  Sunday must be a dead day to them—­a dark room.  No wonder they break through.  But it is not so with the sturdy, unsophisticated laboring class in New England.  If it came to a vote, you would find that the farmers of New England would be the defenders of the day, even if screwed up to the old strictness.  Their instinct is right.  It is an observance that has always worked its best effects upon the common people, and if I were to change the name, I should call Sunday THE POOR MAN’S DAY.

“Men do not yet perceive that the base of the brain is full of despotism, and the coronal brain is radiant with liberty.  I mean that the laws and relations which grow out of men’s relations in physical things are the sternest and hardest, and at every step in the assent toward reason and spirituality, the relations grow more kindly and free.