It ought to be the day reserved for the best in life, for the treasures of affection, for the uses of the spirit.  Whatever is done this day must come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth, and loving service?  Does this enrich lives?  In other words, we may put the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all by ministry to growing lives.

Sec. 2.  CONSERVING THE VALUES

The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest and a day of work.  Man’s right to rest is assured, legally, but commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of the week of ministry to things.  The home has much at stake in this struggle.  It needs one day free from the life that tears its members apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members to live together as spiritual beings.

In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life.  It is devoted to personality, to man’s rights as a religious being.

Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one another, shall look into faces of friends and companions!  And this opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one family.  That is what the church meeting and service ought to be:  our Father’s larger family getting together on the day of the life that makes them one.  For the child the church school and the children’s service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the church family.  If we think of the day as affording us the pleasure of social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties.  Of course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.[31]

Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the presence of one another which is the essential life of the family.  It has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather again for a few hours.  It is the day when we have time to discover how much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when, looking into the eyes of those we love, we see “the light that never was on sea or land,” the ultimate good!