The Eng li sh Sunday rilHE Sunday Cinema Bill may serve
more usefully
to concentrate attention on Sunday than on cinemas. The Bill itself has been fervently supported and as fervently opposed for reasons which, taken iii the mass, reveal the existence of very little clear con- viction as to why cinema theatres should or should not be open on a Sunday. Everything depends, or ought to depend, on what character we desire an English Sunday to possess. The cinema question is purely incidental to that, and the stipulation for an allocation of the proceeds to charity still more incidental. The real trouble is that no definite ideal for the observance of Sunday exists. What has happened is that the traditional Puritan Sunday, with its austerities and prohibitions and its oppressive dreariness to the younger generation, has suffered a series of encroachments, achieved haphazard after a succession of sporadic fights between the traditionalists and the revolutionaries, with the result that in parts of England the cinemas may open and in parts they may not, that where they do open the galleries and museums remain resolutely shut, that everywhere you may at some part. of the day buy beer but nowhere, or practically nowhere, books. The time has come to face the problem of Sunday as a whole. No. one would willingly see Sunday com- mercialized. No one desires to abolish a day of rest. Everyone who has thought of the question seriously desires that the same day of rest shall be observed by as much of the population as possible, so that however it is spent families can if they choose spend it together. The Russian expedient of a five-day week, for 'the individual but not for the connnunity, makes it practically certain that when one member of a family is at leisure others will be at work. That is an argument in itself for reducing Sunday labour as much as possible. At least let it be used when it is used for the most worthy, not the least worthy, ends.
The claims of organized religion must manifestly be given the fullest consideration. The practice of public worship is becoming visibly less prevalent. This is not the place to discuss either the causes of that, nor its effects. To those who regard it as inevitable there may be commended the record of such churches as St. Martin-in-the-Fields, with its challenging notice- boards "Church Full" to greet late-corners on Sunday evenings. But the trend of the times is unmistakable. The cheap motor-car is a new rival for the churches to cope with, and no jury of average men called on to appraise the ultimate values of a Sunday morning in church or chapel and a Sunday in fields or woods would ever reach a unanimous verdict. It is for the churches to fill their emptying pews again if they can, which may involve some readaptation of their message and the method of its presentation, and of the times and the forms of their services. The country churches that are making a special appeal to the Sunday hiker are at any rate showing themselves true to their faith in preferring an active -evangelism to a passive fatalism.
But the problem of the English Sunday is not primarily a problern of the churches. It is a problem of the English citizen, and the English citizen belongs in two cases out of three to the wage-earning rather than the salary-earning class. For him, if he is a town-dweller- the village Sunday is something quite different—Sunday can be an inexpressibly dreary day. Sunday in Bermond- sey, or baton, or Ancoats, is a very different thing from Sunday in Mayfair or Edgbaston—even if Mayfair stayed in town on Sundays. It is against the drab background of the slum street and the tenement that the Sunday problem must be visualized. If ever there was a day when museums and art-galleries should be open it is the day when most of them are shut. The ease for the opening of cinemas is not much less conclusive, but only with important reservations. It may be true that few of the people who spend Sunday evening watching a good film would be better employed if they spent it elsewhere. But the great majority of films unfortunately arc not good. An audience may be none the worse for seeing them—though that is not always true—but it is certainly none the better. That is where a new standard could and ought to be set. It should be possible to say something better for the cinema than merely that it keeps people off the streets, Let us, as several writers in The Times in the last few days have proposed, have a special list of films passed by some competent authority, broadminded but with a definite sense of purpose, for Sunday exhibition, and let those . and no others be permitted. The supply of the right pictures will not fail, for a seven-day film is better business to produce than a six-day.
There is everything to be said for differentiating Sunday from the other six days of the week, but our treatment of it must be constructive, not restrictive. Nothing should he done, by a deliberate encouragement of counter-attractions, to make the way of the churches harder still. The B.B.C. has set a salutary example in leaving the regular hours of service free. Sunday should be made so far as possible a day of rest from the routine of the week, but it need not be a day of aimless boredom. It can be a day of healthy recreation both for body and mind, and since the screen and the concert platform appeal to ten or twenty times as many as can find facilities for physical exercise it is constructive development in those fields that demands attention first. The old Sunday with its oppressive Sabbatarianism is gone for ever, but between that and a Sunday given over to nothing but pleasure for pleasure's sake there is another kind of Sunday that can be better than either. Sunday labour cannot be completely eliminated, and the Sunday closing of galleries and libraries is not justified on that ground. All of them should be open. The experiment of opening some of the schools for popular lectures might well be made. The real trouble is that of the people who are thinking about Sunday at all—there are not very many of them—more are thinking about how it should not be spent than of how it should. The first need is for men and women of idealism and resource to concentrate on the positive aim. For though a nation cannot be dragooned into the best kind of Sunday observance it can be very • definitely guided.
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