Yet, there is also something positive about it, for the simple fact of desisting from toil contains an element of direct homage.  Six days are ours for ourselves.  What accrues from our activity on those days is our profit.  To God we sacrifice one day and all it might bring to us, we pay to Him a tithe of our time, labor and earnings.  By directing aright our intentions, therefore, our rest assumes the higher dignity of explicit, emphatic religion and reverence, and in a fuller manner sanctifies the day that is the Lord’s.

We should, however, guard ourselves against the mistaken notion that sloth and idleness are synonymous of rest.  It is not all activity, but the ordinary activity of common life, that is forbidden.  It were a sacrilegious mockery to make God the author of a law that fosters laziness and favors the sluggard.  Another extreme that common sense condemns is that the physical man should suffer martyrdom while the soul thus communes with God, that promenades and recreation should be abolished, and social amenities ignored, that dryness, gloom, moroseness and severity are the proper conditions of Sabbatical observance.

In this respect, our Puritan ancestors were the true children of Pharisaism, and their Blue Laws more properly belong in the Talmud than in the Constitution of an American Commonwealth.  God loves a cheerful giver, and would you not judge from appearances that religion was painful to these pious witch-burners and everything for God most grudgingly done?  Sighs, grimaces, groans and wails, this is the homage the devils in hell offer to the justice of God; there is no more place for them in the religion of earth than in the religion of heaven.

Correlative with the obligation of rest is that of purely positive worship, and here is the difficulty of deciding just what is the correct thing in religious worship.  The Jews had their institutions, but Christ abolished them.  The Pagans had their way—­sacrifice; Protestants have their preaching and hymn-singing.  Catholics offer a Sacrifice, too, but an unbloody one.  Later on, we shall hear the Church speak out on the subject.  She exercised the right to change the day itself; she claims naturally the right to say how it should be observed, because the day belongs to her.  And she will impose upon her children the obligation to attend mass.  But here the precepts of the Church are out of the question.

The obligation, however, to participate in some act of worship is plain.  The First Commandment charges every man to offer an exterior homage of one kind or another, at some time or another.  The Third sets aside a day for the worship of the Divinity.  Thus the general command of the first precept is specified.  This is the time, or there is no time.  With the Third Commandment before him, man cannot arbitrarily choose for himself the time for his worship, he must do it on Sunday.