320 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lamented friend Dr. Bence Jones, when a steamboat on the river, with 

 its living freight, passed us. Practically acquainted with the moral 

 and physical influence of pure oxygen, my friend exclaimed, "What 

 a blessing for these people to be able thus to escape from London into 

 the fresh air of the country ! " I hold the physician to have been right, 

 and, with all respect, the Bishop to have been wrong. 



Bishop Blomfield also condemns resorting to tea-gardens on Sun- 

 day. But we may be sure that it is not the gardens, but the minds 

 which the people bring to them, which produce disorder. These minds 

 possess the culture of the city, to which the Bishop seems disposed to 

 confine them. Wisely and soberly conducted and it is perfectly pos- 

 sible to conduct them wisely and soberly such places might be con- 

 verted into aids toward a life which the Bishop would commend. 

 Purification and improvement are often possible where extinction is 

 neither possible nor desii-able. I have spent many a Sunday afternoon 

 in the public gardens of the little university town of Marburg, in the 

 company of intellectual men and cultivated women, without observing 

 a single occurrence which, as regards morality, might not be permitted 

 in the Bishop's drawing-room. I will add to this another observation 

 made at Dresden on a Sunday after the suppression of the insurrection 

 by the Prussian soldiery in 1849. The victorious troops were encamped 

 on the banks of the Elbe, and this is how they occupied themselves : 

 Some were engaged in physical games and exercises which in England 

 would be considered innocent in the extreme ; some were conversing 

 sociably ; some singing the songs of XJhland, while others, from ele- 

 vated platforms, recited to listening groups poems and passages from 

 Goethe and Schiller. Through this crowd of military men passed and 

 rej^assed the girls of the city, linked together with their arms round 



each other's necks. During hours of observation, I heard no word 



. . . ' 



which was unfit for a modest ear ; while from beginning to end I failed 



to notice a single case of intoxication.* 



Here we touch the core of the whole matter the appeal to expe- 

 rience. Sabbatical rigor has been tried, and the question is, Have its 

 results been so conducive to good morals and national happiness as to 

 render criminal every attempt to modify it ? The advances made in 

 all kinds of knowledge in this our age are known to be enormous ; and 

 the public desire for instruction, which the intellectual triumphs of the 

 time naturally and inevitably arouse, is commensurate with the growth 

 of knowledge. Must this desire, which is the motive power of all real 

 and healthy progress, be quenched or left unsatisfied, lest Sunday ob- 

 servances, unknown to the early Christians, repudiated by the heroes 

 of the Reformation, and insisted upon for the first time during a period 

 of national gloom and suffering in the seventeenth century, should be 



* The late Mr. Joseph Kay, as Traveling Bachelor of the University of Cambridge, 

 has borne strong and earnest testimony to the " humanizing and civilizing influence " of 

 the Sunday recreations of the German people. 



