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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 87

Don't make Slaves of Tour Children on Sunday

Don't make Slaves of Tour Children on Sunday.

The idea that there is any God that hates to hear a child laugh! Let your children play games on Sunday. Here is a poor man that hasn't enough money to go to a big church, and he has too much independence to go to a little church that the big church built for charity. He don't want to slide into heaven that way. I tell you, don't come to church, but go to the woods and take your family an 1 a lunch with you, and sit down upon the old log and let the children gather flowers and hear the leaves whispering poems like memories of long ago, and when the sun is about going down kissing the summits of far hills, go home with your hearts filled with throbs of joy. There is more recreation and joy in that than going to a dry goods box with a steeple on top of it and hearing a man tell yon that your chances are about ninety-nine to one for being eternally damned. Let us make this Sunday a day of splendid pleasure, not to excess, but to everything that makes man purer and grander and nobler. I would like to see something like this: Instead of so many churches, a vast cathedral that would hold twenty or thirty thousand of 'people, and I would like to see an opera produced in it that would make the souls of men have higher and grander and nobler aims. I would like to see the walls covered with pictures and the niches rich with statuary; I would like to see something put there that you could use in this world now, and I do not believe in sacrificing the present to the future; I do not believe in drinking skimmed milk here with the promise of butter beyond the clouds. Space or time cannot be holy any more than a vacuum can be pious. Not a bit, not a bit; and no day can be so holy but what