The Oologist. 



VOL. XIV. NO. 11. 



ALBION, N. Y., NOVEMBER, 1897. Whole No. 138 



Sunday in the Woods. 



Dear Oologist : 



By a series of miscarriages my July 

 Oologist has only just now reacned 

 me. But I beg of you to give me space 

 for a few words regarding the article 

 on ''Sunday in the Woods," which is, I 

 believe, calculated to do great mischief. 



The columns of our ornithological 

 journals are no places for religious con- 

 troversy, but when those columns are 

 opened to the violating of sentiments, 

 which, however harmless they may be 

 to those of matured moral and spii'itnal 

 habit, are likely to mislead the young, 

 it may surely be permitted one who is 

 not merely a christian but a clergyman 

 to lift up, through these same columns, 

 the penny-trumpet of his voice, against 

 one of the most mischievous tendencies 

 of modern liberal religious thought. 



When men begin, in all apparent 

 soberness, to advocate the use of the 

 telephone, for the audible transmission 

 of sermons and anthems, it becomes 

 urgently time to inquire, whether some 

 phases of modern Christianity do not 

 savor more of farce, or of delusion, 

 than they do of sober, dignified and up- 

 lifting religious thought. 



Let me preface further remark by 

 saying that I am most deeply in sym- 

 pathy with that great — and growing — 

 class of Nature-lovers who cannot com- 

 mune with Nature save on the Lord's 

 day. In my Kansas days I had a friend 

 — an unbeliever — who was harnessed 

 to the exacting routine of a village 

 store from half past six o'clock on Mon- 

 day morning until half past nine o'clock 

 on Saturday evening. The woman of 

 his love had been forbidden by a 

 drunken father to marry him. On my 

 way home from church, of a Sunday 

 noon, I used to meet this devoted 



young couple as they were returning 

 from the river, laden, for all the bur- 

 den of their oars, with flowers and 

 moss and a occasional dainty nest. 

 And I remember yet how my heart 

 used' to warm toward them as I felt- 

 from the sereneness of their faces rath- 

 er than learned from any vocal expres- 

 sion of their feelings, that they, no less- 

 truly than 1, had been gathering 

 strength for the work of the coming 

 day, and that is the noble function of 

 both the religion of Nature and the re- 

 ligion of revelation. 



Moreover, I, too — I freely confess — 

 love to seek the woods for ornithologi- 

 cal study and observation, in the 

 scanty moments of rest that remain 

 from the exacting duties of the Lord's 

 day. And nowhere, more truly than 

 in the aisles of the woods, has my heart 

 ever been lifted up in fervent praise or 

 in earnest aspiration; and yet 1 know 

 very well what would befall me spirit- 

 ually were this the exclusive shrine of 

 my heart's devotion. 



The Westminister Catechism— by 

 which I do not swear by any means — 

 very accurately and finely declares that 

 the chief end of man is "To know God 

 and to enjoy him forever." But how 

 are we to know God? If we are to 

 know him at all it must be in his own 

 appointed way. We are His creatures 

 and our highest perfection is attainable 

 only through conformity on our part to 

 his wise and merciful laws. 



The modern idea that each man's 

 own soul is a shrine, wherein, exclus- 

 ively, a man may find intercourse with 

 his God, is as startlingly untrue to the 

 conditions of the natural man as it is to 

 the revelation that God has given us of 

 Himself. The nineteenth century dic- 

 tum that one may worship God as well 

 in his own home, or in the woods, as in 



