is not the point.  The point is whether the day of rest and worship shall be like every other day; whether we shall let our minds go right on as they have been going, to the choking up of avenues of spiritual growth and religious service.  Is it right for us to allow in Milton the occurrence of baseball games and Sunday racing and evening theatres?  How far is all this demoralizing to our better life?  What would Christ say, do you think?  Even supposing he would advise this church to take and read the big Sunday daily sent in on the special Sunday train, that keeps a small army of men at work and away from all Sunday privileges; even supposing he would say it was all right to sell fruit and cigars and meat on Sunday, and perfectly proper for church members to buy those things on that day, what would Christ say was the real meaning and purpose of this day in the thought of the Divine Creator when he made the day for man?

“I cannot conceive that he would say anything else than this to the people of this town and this church:  He would say it was our duty to make this day different from all other days in the two particulars of rest and worship.  He would say that we owe it to the Father of our souls in common gratitude for his mighty love toward us that we spend the day in ways pleasing to him.  He would say that the wonderful civilization of our times should study how to make this day a true rest day to the workingman of the world, and that all unnecessary carrying of passengers or merchandise should stop, so as to give all men, if possible, every seven days, one whole day of rest and communion with something better than the things that perish with the using.  He would say that the Church and the church-member and the Christian everywhere should do all in his power to make the day a glad, powerful, useful, restful, anticipated twenty-four hours, looked forward to with pleasant longing by little children and laboring men and railroad men and street-car men as the one day of all the week, the happiest and best because different in its use.  And so different that when Monday’s toil begins the man feels refreshed in body and in soul because he has paused a little while in the mad whirl of his struggle for bread or fame, and has fellow-shipped with heavenly things, and heard something diviner than the Jangling discords of this narrow, selfish earth.

“If this thought of Sunday is bigotry or narrowness, then I stand convicted as a bigot living outside of the nineteenth century.  But I am not concerned about that.  What I am concerned about is Christ’s thought of this day.  If I understand his spirit right I believe he would say what I have said.  He would say that it is not a right use of this day for the men and women of this generation to buy and sell merchandise, to attend or countenance places or spectacles of amusement, to engage in card parties at their homes, to fill their thoughts full of the ordinary affairs of business or the events of the