MARGINAL COMMENTS
By ROSE MACAULAY
THE Secretary of the Lord's Day Observance Society has been remonstrating with the B.B.C. for tarnishing its tradition of the Unsoiled Sunday. Once more the ancient enquiry, debated since the first Christian century, arises—what soils Sunday ? Practically any- thing, was the ancient answer. The Emperor Constantine declared the witnessing of all Sunday entertainments except public executions and tortures to be penal offences.
The Church, in fact, took over most of the taboos of the Jewish Saturday. The Middle Ages resounded with stern ecclesiastical and literary denunciations of Sunday mirth. The Elizabethan puritans, heirs of this tradition, cried out against the Sunday of their countrymen, spent so cheerfully at May games, church ales, piping, dancing, carding, bowling, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, hunting, football, bawdy plays and wanton books, " whereby God is dishonoured, his Sabbath violated, his sacraments contemned, and his people marvellously corrupted." " You will be deemed too-too stoical," another speaker in this dialogue replies, " if you should restrain men from those exercises upon the Sabbath, for they suppose that that day was ordained and conse- crate to that end and purpose . . . and was it not so ? " Most certainly not, has been, down the ages, the Christian answer to this ingenuous enquiry. The Lord's Day Observance Society has an unimpeachable pedigree for its theory of the so easily soilable Sunday.
Nor does its most recent reply to the enquiry, what soils Sunday, lack precedent. Sex does so, it says. Its ancestors, the Church teachers of early and mediaeval centuries, went further. They held that this (appar- ently) necessary, but distressing, biological division of the animal kingdom soiled, also, weekdays ; soiled, in fact, the whole of terrestrial life. They were probably right. They certainly would not have stopped at saying that sex soils Sunday. They would have proceeded through the week, maintaining that matrimony mars Monday, trothing tarnishes Tuesday, weddings waste Wednesday, trousseaux trivialize Thursday, family life fritters Friday, and sweethearting sullies Saturday. And very courageous they were to stick to their guns in the face of a stubborn, and recalcitrant world which has always pursued, with such unflagging ardour and perseverance, these activities. Worse, humanity has always been inclined to regard its weekly holiday as a peculiarly favourable day for such pastimes—almost, in fact, " consecrate to that end and purpose "—so that, on a summer Sunday evening, you will see youths and maidens dallying on stiles, field paths, lanes, and street corners,' cheerful and untimely exponents of this tremendous biological solecism. I assume that the Lord's Day Observance Society would wish to prohibit these Sunday pastimes. Or is it only their presentation on stage and screen, in litera- ture and in public discussion, that it deplores on the first day ? Very certainly there are many topics of greater and rarer interest than these crude and well- nigh universal human affections. The arts, for instance, and the stars ; the navigation of sea and sky ; the dis- covery of strange lands and strange facts ; the curious customs of gods, men, and beasts ; the surprising celestial antics of the planet Venus and of the moon ; the curvature of space ; the beauties of literature, the excitements of history, and the vegetation of tropical islands ; with a thousand more such delightful phenomena. But, attend to these as we may, the great solecism will keep breaking in, stale but ever fresh ; yes, even on a Sunday.
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