Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1879 — A Plea for Sunday Out-Door Recreation. N. Y. Herald. [ARTICLE]

A Plea for Sunday Out-Door Recreation. N. Y. Herald.

It is probable that those superlatively good people who desire the suspension of all business on Sundays, except their own business of going to church, may be correct in supposing that if the whole world could be persuaded to maae a labor of prayer on the day of rest, from sunrise untill night, we should sli be more pious than we now are. A tall events we should be more bilious and dyspeptic, which .are indications of Puritanical perfection. But there is a certain amount of the old leaven in mankind, which, as it cannot be expurgated, must be taken into consideration in our efforts to manufacture piety, and a vast number of people insist upon being good in their own way. One popular method is too devote a . certain portion of the day of rest to religious duties -and the remaining portion to healthful recreations calculated to aid morality by strengthening the body, invigorating the constitution and giving a cheerful happy tone to the disposition. To ordinary minds this appears to be a very desirable practice, and one that deserves encouragemen t. We want Sunday travel and innocent Sunday amusements, and we cannot have too much of eitner. Haifa million of people who are shut up in close workshops and unhealthy tenement houses from morning till night and from night till morning again on six days of the week do not want to pass the entire seventh day at prayer in churches and. in their closets. They want to go forth in to the fresh air, to drink in seabreezes and enjoy the fragance of green fields, and the more freely they can do so at a trifling cost, carrying their puny, suffering children with them, the better Christian men and women they will be. The running of all the rapid transit railroad trains on Sunday will facilitate travel and give the working classes the chance of spending their only leisure day in the country. If caurch congregations here and there are annoyed by passing trains, let them remember chat the cars carry thousands upon thousands of human beings out oT the hot crowded tenement house districts into pure air of the upper part of the island, and if they are realy Christians they will forget the momentary offence to their delicate ears in the thought that it is the signal of happiness and health fur half the population of the city. It is to bejnoped that the Metropoltan rapid transit road will carry out its intention to run Sunday trains, begin ing next Sunday. No class has a right to object to what is for the general convenience and the general good. The idea that the running of trains is a desecration of the Sabbath is an exploded piece of bigotry that ought to be buried with the blue laws, and is about as sensible as to claim chat walking, dressing washing and cooking are similar desecrations. The church-goers who insist that for their own comfort or their own fancies thousands of people shall be denied the opportunity to take a cheap ride into the country on the Sabbath must be sufficiently frigid in their Christianity to be able to sit in their places of worship with closed windows In the dog days, and thus escape the noise of the passing trains altogether.

A New York lady writes: “If I could have my way, every smoker should many a smoker, or live alone forever.” Now, do you know that would be rather a nice idea—matrimonial smoke as it were—one pipe with but a single blast, two stems as smoke as one. Smoking girls desirous of getting married will please mention the particular brand of tobacco they effect.