SUNDAY IN AUCKLAND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14925, 24 February 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

SUNDAY IN AUCKLAND.

BY FRANK, MORTON.

•L* Newt Zealand, Aucklander*- have .this distinction that they are remarkably cheerful on Sundays. In Invercargili nobody can bo very cheerful at any time. In Dunedin no one seriously pretends to be cheerful on Sundays. In Christchurch, only the young people try hard to be cheerful on that day. In Wellington everybody grins his hardesV without feeling in the least like it. But in Auckland there is a certain contagious touch of joyousness in the day. The people you meet, whether they be going to church or to a picnic, all look happy. I suppose it is the climate. •

The ono thing that no sane man can defend in > puritanism is its gloom. The strict and rigid Puritans were always dour and forbidding. This gloom was a necessary part of their religion, a proof of their sincerity ; for they had somehow boon brought to accept, the shocking heresy that the good God loves long faces. So they were tyrants in their homos, and they had dangerous tongues abroad. When they found, any man laughing on a Sunday, they knew and condemned him straight away as an unbeliever and most A-ile Amalekite. This idea or prejudice was so disseminated that it still persists to some extent in all Christian countries. Even in Paris, there is (or there recently was) a Sabbath Observance League. M. Berenger and his friends would have as gloomy a Sunday in Paris as even tho savagest Diincdinite could desire, if they could only have their way. You see, all these Sabbatarians have an inveterate idea that mirth and honest human enjoyment must be in some way sinful. As to holding any sort of secular gatherings on a Sunday— that is the deadliest sin. When I was a small boy in Stoke there were still many stupid people in the English provinces who held that the Tichborne claimant was a man shamefully used and done out of his rights. In my town, 'these queer folk used to have "Tichbovne meetings" on Sunday nights. They disregarded plain evidence and made tho same preposterous statements, at every meeting, but I don't suppose that they really did anybody the slightest particle of harm. But because they held . their meetings on Sunday nights they were regarded as heathen of a peculiarly bad' type.

The Sabbatarian spirit is not so strong in middle-England as it was, and it is slowly dying out in other parts of the world. On the continent of Europe, Sunday is a day largely given over to the enjoyment of the people. In the city of San Francisco, which is in Christian America, the theatres are open on Sunday nights, and, doubtless, some worse places, and so it is, to a modified extent, in New York.' In Auckland, while everybody behaves well on Sundays, I find that many people devote the day to pleasure. Some go on excursions, and some get out to flowery suburbs, and spend the day with friends. There is no predetermination of glumness.

Incidentally, 1 made a discovery about Auckland's' Sunday system "(if I may express it so) that made me savage. One Sunday morning early, I went out beyond Epsom to see a friend, and before I went, I arranged to bo back in time to call on Mr. H. B. Irving at 11. . I had a- mile to walk to and from the tram at the Epsom end, and the time-allowance must in any case have been cut rather fine. However that may be, I got back to Greenwood's corner at somewhere about 10.40, and found that there were to be no more trams into town until church hours were over. If you have ever walked your hardest into town from Epsom on a hot Sunday morning you will sympathise with my feelings. I was, in point of fact, only one of several. At Newmarket I passed a Southerner and his wife, trudging back to town. Then 1 joined myselt to a brisk young fellow who told me that pretty well every Sunday people could be found in the same fix.

That seems to me to be a most extraordinary arrangement. If you say, as the Wellington City Council says, " We will run no trams on Sunday mornings, becausethe men might as well have halt a day's spell," you are at least logical. But to start a service early in the morning, and then interrupt it for a couple of hours or so in the forenoon, where is the sense of it? The congregations that could he disturbed by the passing of trams are very few, and all the ordinary traffic, apart from trams, passes while the services are in progress. I have always held that, in regard to public, traffic, the convenience of the public should be put before everything. For a long time, here in Wellington, th© trams coming down Molesworth-street were switched off by an inconvenient loop, so that they might not pass Parliament House and confuse the deliberations of legislators. Just recently, the Council has stopped that foolishness ; the trams run right pact that sacred place, and no one is a whit the worse.

For myself, I would sooner risk anything than I would risk the-liberties of the people. If we are to be the bondslaves of the Christian Sunday why should there not be a consideration of the Jewish Sabbath?— what I can see, there is quite a number of Jews in Auckland. I don't happen to attend church with any regularity myself; but I have no feeling against those who do. Last Sunday morning I was out for a walk, and I met my closest associate. He had been up to the Redemptorist Fathers' church on the top of the hill, arid was in an eminently pious and tractable frame of mind. I had soaked myself in some of our rare sunlight, and was passably content. We had both had a good morning; but if I had been compelled to go to church with him I might, not have enjoyed it at all, and if he had been compelled to join me in my walk ho certainly would not have enjoyed it, because he happened to have a blistered foot. He is a man of infinite resource. When lie has a blistered, foot he goes to church. It is when I get right away from bricks and mortar and all the ceremonial of religion that I feel deepest. Then, with Mr. Gosse, I can say : — 7 do not hunter for a well-stored mind, 1 onlv wish to live my life, and find My heart in unison with all mankind. My life is like the single dewy star That trembles on the horizon's primrose bar— , A microcosm where all things living are. And if, anions: the noiseless grasses, death Khonld come behind and take away my breath. , ~ I should not rise as one who Borroweth; For I should pass; but all the world would Full of desire and young delight and gle*. And why should men be sad through loss of me?' The light is flying; in the silver-blue The voting moon shines from her bright window through: The mowers are all gone, and I go too.