The German Sunday. 65 



action and influence. The advocates of tlie continental Sun- 

 day may say to tliose on the other side : Your custom has had 

 two centuries of possession of the land ; it should be strong 

 enough to stand ; but we find thousands of your own people, 

 if not welcoming our mode, at least weary of yours. Had all 

 our English-speaking citizens been firm for our own custom, the 

 new comers would have accepted it, in spite of their increasing 

 numbers, as their predecessors had done. But having lost 

 that vantage-ground, the friends of the old mode are disposed 

 to strike very wildly and unreasonably, I must be allowed to 

 say, in its defence and in attack upon the strange Sunday. 

 Into the theological aspects of the question we do not enter 

 here ; but the most strenuous advocates of the Puritan Sab- 

 bath, or the one most shocked by the continental innovations, 

 may well be advised not to waste breath, and risk his cause 

 by surveying the field from no point of view but his own. 

 There may be in the annals of human folly precedents enough 

 for announcing, "Thus saith the Lord," with one's own inter- 

 pretation of the saying, and then proceeding to style all who 

 don't agree and obey, infidels and unbelievers. But I think 

 it will be wiser to consider what is to be said on the other side 

 before you band together against you all sorts of opponents, 

 many of them of your own making by your process. 



Here in Wisconsin our conflict on the question has been 

 brought about chiefly by our large German immigration, and 

 I shall speak therefore, henceforth, of the German rather than 

 the Continental Sunday. If we inquire into the history of 

 the German Sunday, we shall find that it has the highest sanc- 

 tions of Luther and his brother-reformers. Those great men 

 were but human, and could no more restrain the reformation- 

 pendulum at once in its proper arc, than the rest of us can in 

 minor-matters They found the Lord's day included in a 

 great number of church festivals and fasts, all put on a like 

 ground of obligation, and burdening the people. Their re- 

 forming zeal undertook to discriminate between the Sunday 



