Sunday Trams

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 42, 15 October 1903, Page 1

Sunday Trams

Sunday Auckland is still, as we write, enjoying as best it can the protracted pangs of the revived dispute over the running of Sunday trams. It may interest our readers in that fair city to learn that, in 1899, the Dunedin Presbytery and Ministers' Association lodged a protest

against the running of tram cars on ' the Sabbath day,, l Of course they did not mean the Sabbath (Saturday), but Sunday. The directors of the various tram companies serenely pointed out to the reverend protestants that most of the traffic on Sundays consisted of people going to and coming from the churches. One company alone (then known as the Dunedin Tramways Co.) carried 700 people every Sunday to various Protestant churches in the city. A prominent member of the Mornington Company pointed out to the dark-robed deputationists that the remedy was in their leverences' own hands — they had only to impress upon their people the moral turpitude of riding to church on tram cars. This (he pointed out) would, if taken to heart, at once strangle off the Sunday traffic by reducing it to sxich insignificant dimensions that it would not pay. It is, by the way, broadly hinted that many of the most ardent clerical Sabbatarians ride or drive from place to place on the Lord's Day in connection with their ecclesiastical duties, and there are few among them, we ween, that would be content to preach their Sunday discourses on diet so comfortless and unstimulating as Saturday's cauld kail and brose.

All this reminds us of the worthy old dame who was greatly scandalised at seeing the late Queen Victoria driving to church from Balmoral on what our Presbyterian friends call the Sabbath day. ' But,' objected a loyal subject in defence, ' did not the Lord and His Apostles pluck ears of wheat and shell them on the Sabbath day? 1 ' Aweel, they did,' said the stern old dame, ' but I think no better o' 'em for that.' There is a good deal of this brand of ' theology ; loose in New Zealand,