The modern disapproval felt by British visitors for the behaviour of the French people on Sunday is due in great part to the cautious conduct of the Roman Catholic minority in England, who do not venture to show openly what kind of Sunday it is that their Church would hold to be innocently employed. To avoid scandal in a country where the influence of Puritanism is still powerful, they keep a Sunday that is outwardly almost a Sabbath, and are careful to avoid many recreations that the Church of Rome has always freely permitted. In fact, that Church permits all recreations on the first day of the week that she sanctions on any other, including the most active exercises. What she really forbids is lucrative professional labour. A lawyer should not study a case on Sunday, unless there is urgent necessity, but he is perfectly free to amuse himself, however noisily, in sawing and hammering. A professional artist may do better not to paint (although there is a kind of special toleration for artistic and intellectual pursuits, as being different from mere drudgery), but an amateur, working for recreation, may take his apparatus into the fields. Disinterested studies of all kinds are permitted by the Church on Sunday. It is not in a Roman Catholic country that geologists would be in danger of being stoned, as they have been in Scotland, for hammering at rocks on that day.[59] [Sidenote: A French Sunday.] Here is the way in which some very religious French people spent a Sunday in 1886, I being one of the party. They went to mass early in the morning, in the chapel of the nearest _château_; then they made preparations for receiving their friends. The friends came after _déjeuner_, two families, in addition to seven guests staying in the house. Some of them remained in the garden, sat about in camp chairs and talked; others went to the village _fête_, where, of course, there was a great deal of dancing and other amusements, which they looked upon quite benevolently. Now, it so happened that those who went to the _fête_ were the most religious people of the whole party. On their return we had dinner, and the most pious were by no means the least merry. After dinner the young ladies gave us some music, and one of them played a waltz. This set the young people dancing, and so a dance was improvised which lasted till eleven o’clock, when the guests drove away in the moonlight.[60] [Sidenote: Success of the Puritan Legislation in Scotland.]