Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Some people believe that when General Conference assigned them to the
Committee on Hymn-Book Revision, power and authority were given unto
them to put a half-sole and a new heel on any and all poetry that might
look to them to be a little run over on one side. If they felt as I
do about the lines that head this article they would have “Sunday”
scratched out and “Sabbath” written in before you could bat an eye. The
mere substitution of one word for another may seem a light matter to a
man that has never composed anything more literary than an obituary for
the Western Advocate of Sister Jane Malinda Sprague, who was born in
Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1816, removed with her parents at
a tender age to New Sardis, Washington County, Ohio, where, etc., etc.
If he wanted to extract a word he would do it, and never even offer to
give the author gas. But I know just how it hurts. I know or can imagine
how the gifted poet that penned the deathless lines I have quoted must
have walked the floor in an agony until every word and syllable was
just to suit him, and so, though I feel sure he meant to write
“Sabbath-school,” I don't dare change it.
To most persons one word seems about as good as another, Sunday or
Sabbath, but when there are young people about the house you learn to be
careful how you talk before them. Now, I would not go so far as to say
that “Sunday” is what you might call exactly rowdy, but er... but...
er... Let me illustrate. If a man says, “It's a beautiful Sunday
morning,” like enough he has on red-and-green stockings, baggy
knickerbockers, a violet-and-purple sweater, a cap shaped like a
milk-roll, and is smoking a pipe. He very likely carries a bagful of
golf-sticks, or is pumping up his bicycle. But if a man says, “This
beautiful Sabbath morn,” you know for a certainty that he wears a
long-tailed black coat, a boiled shirt, and a white tie. He is bald from
his forehead upward, his upper lip is shaven, and his views and those
of the late Robert Reed on the disgusting habit of using tobacco are
absolutely at one.
Not alone a regard for respectability, but the hankering to be
historically accurate, urges me to make the change I speak of.
Originally the institution was a Sunday-school, and not very respectable
either. I should hate to think any of my dear young friends were in the
habit of attending such a low-class affair as Robert Raikes conducted.
Sunday-schools were for “little ragamuffins,” as he called them, who
worked such long hours on week-days (from five in the morning until nine
at night) that if they were to learn the common branches at all it had
to be on a Sunday. A ragged school was bad enough in itself, putting
foolish notions into the heads of gutter-brats and making them
discontented and unhappy in their lot; but to teach a ragged school
on Sunday was a little too much. So Robert Raikes encountered the most
violent opposition, although from that beginning dates popular education
in England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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