Sometimes we are too tired to keep Sunday properly, and we give to “private sloth the time which was meant for public worship;” but surely then the Sabbath breaking lay really in the week’s excess of work.  If we allow ourselves to live so hard in the week, to be so late on Saturday, that we are sleepy and stupid on Sunday morning, then we are not keeping the Fourth Commandment, even if we force ourselves to go to Church; we are not serving God with a fair share of our mind and strength.

In these over-worked days of nerve exhaustion, it should be an inducement to remember how fresh and unwearied Mr. Gladstone was kept by his regular Sunday habits.  He said, “Sunday I reserve for religious employments, and this has kept me alive and well, even to a marvel, in time of considerable labour.  We are born on each Lord’s day morning into a new climate, where the lungs and heart of the Christian life should drink in continuously the vital air.”

Retreats and Rest-cures are nowadays found to be imperatively necessary; but are not both symptoms of something over-wrought in our system?  Would it not be well for some if they tried, as Miss Wordsworth suggests, the effect of keeping one Sunday in the week?

I do not wish to dwell on the unselfish side of the question—­the moral obligation of keeping to those forms of entertainment and games which give as little trouble as possible to servants,—­I am sure that needs no enforcing on a generous mind.

Neither do I wish to discuss what employments are suitable for Sunday, though I should like to draw your attention to a suggestion, in the Bishop of Salisbury’s Guild Manual, that Sunday letters should always, as a matter of principle, have some Sunday element in them, and that we should refrain from writing to people with whom we were not on this footing.  How often our Sunday letters only clear our writing-table, that it may be freer for Monday’s business!

Neither do I speak of our duty to God in the matter of worship, nor of the definite rules as to church-going which each must make for herself, if her religion is not to vary with every house she stays in; I do not speak of the obligation binding on every member of the Church to conform to her Church’s regulations as to united worship.  Every one of these points need a chapter to itself, and I wish to keep to a single point which seems in great danger of being neglected in this hurrying age, when there is such terrible likelihood that we may “never once possess our souls before we die.”

It is not the duty of keeping Sunday on which I want to lay stress, but the fact that we dare not, for our own safety’s sake, neglect it.  Our moral thoughtfulness, our spiritual growth, the very existence of our inner life, depends on our obtaining a sufficient supply of the air of Heaven to keep our souls alive.  To use Dean Church’s words:  “On the way in which we spend our Sundays depends, for most of us, the depth, the reality, the steadiness, of our spiritual life.”