Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 June 1884 — German Sundays. [ARTICLE]

German Sundays.

i Most devoutly I sat through my first church service in Europe. It was in the glorious Cologne Cathedral. All About me—sometimes kneeling on the floor, sometimes standing—were officers in uniform, tourists, ladies in beautiful black toilets, bareheaded serving- maids, country women with their lunch-baskets beside them, peasants in gay costumes with knitting work under their arms—for country women had come to mass only as a prelude to the afternoon holiday in the park. People walked about and chatted; now and then there was music, from a boy choir - high np, and sometimes the intoning of the priests reached me as from a distant building, and there came an -odor of incense as from some far-away land of perfume. Could anything be more unlike our own home Sunday service ? But can we say that ours to them is less strsnge than theirs to us? “You put on your best clothes to go to church in America, don’t you ? How very queer!” said a German Romanist to me one day. ’ It is with a pleasurable satisfaction, and a great longing too, that one turns on Sunday toward home when in Germany. The American Sunday they have no conception of. The good Lutheran pastor will preach you a sermon Sunday morning that will make you cry, and ask you to a game of cards with him before the organ is done playing. Ladies whom I visited sewed, had their dresses cut and fitted, and made no difference whatever between Sunday and week day, except that there must always be a dinner party on the first. The shops are open; indeed, Sunday is about the only day in the week you can be sure of doing shopping in some places, since every saint’s day is carefully kept by shutting up stores, going to mass in the morning and spending the rest of the day in the gardens. The Lord’s day only does not seem worth keeping. Said a young gentleman to me one: “Do I understand you that you can’t begin a journey, go to the theater, buy a coat if you neeed one, or give a ball on Sunday, in America?” I assured him he would not be expected to do those things. “And that is what you call a free country, is it?” he retorted.—Mrs. Jf. J. Pitman’s “European Breezes.”