The Sunday Question

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 30, 29 October 1932, Page 16

The Sunday Question

WOULD say to the person who rather boasts he never darkens a i ‘ J church door that he is reall yinflicting a penalty upon himself,” | writes Mr. W. H. Jacobsen, in the “Congregational Quarterly.” 1 “Does this seem a foolish statement? May I affirm that X the man who does not take physical exercise is—unless prohibited by circumstances—a fool? Is he not inflicting a most decided penalty upon himself? I take for granted that man has a physical body and a spiritual constitution. Both are heirlooms of the ages. The consciousness must take into consideration the mind and the body. Each depends upon nutriment. It just comes to this: the strict necessity for food. Who would dcny.it? I put the mutton chop and the intelligent book as so many opportunities for nutriment.' “ Granted the mental necessity, it must follow that such a survey must take into account what is understood as the spiritual. This is no artificial sequence. We are all spirits. The question resolves itself into an inquiry as to ways and means for providing food for the spiritual nature . . . “ The call to a place of worship should arise from a kind of inborn necessity just as the instincts of hunger suggest the dinner table. Sunday provides the meal for the spiritual hunger. That man or woman devoid of spiritual hunger is to be pitied. Something is wanting. The question of Sunday observance pales entirely into significance beside the joy of the Sunday opportunity. One need not bother oneself about the propriety of playing games, etc., on the Sunday. Let simple natural worship be placed in the foreground ; the other matters can be safely left to look after themselves.

“For the health of the body we take exercise and eat. food. For the health of the spirit we should do likewise.” “If we broke all our Victorian stained glass, made all our churches palaces of fresh air, light, and glorous colour, shortened our services by half, demolished our pews, and interned our vergers, the non-churchgoer would still not come to church—for the simple reason that the idea of there being any duty in the matter has not so much as occurred to him,” writes Professor N. P. Williams, in. the “Manchester Guardian.” “ He assumes that churchgoing is for those who like it, like operagoing; and organised religion (outside the Roman Catholic Church) has been disposed to acquiesce in this view, and to entreat and coax him into liking it, instead of telling him bluntly that it is the duty of a baptised Christian to assist at the public corporate worship of the Christian Church on the Lord’s Day, whether he happens to ‘like’ it or not. “ Church conferences have spent much time in discussing the question ‘Why do not men come to church?’; but they have not made much progress, nor will they, until they have faced and made up their minds about the previous question: ‘Why should men’—or women either, for that matter — ‘come to church?’ Is it a duty, in the full and solemn sense of the word, the omission of which is, at the least, a grave moral failure? Or is It a matter of personal taste and inclination? “If the Church authorises do not feel that they are prepared to sound the note of inexorable duty in the matter, the practice of churchgoing is likely .in course of time to lapse into desuetude.”