For people who cannot get much recreation at home, there are increasing opportunities to go to concerts, picture-galleries, and museums. Among the reading-rooms thrown open on Sunday in America about 1870 was that of the Boston Public Library; and no difference is now made in this great institution among the seven days, except that more children's books and magazines are accessible on Sunday. What important museums are now open in London, Boston, and New York have been already mentioned in Chapter VI. These opportunities are still limited; but there is no obstacle, except that of bad weather, to excursions on foot or bicycle, behind horse or locomotive, in electric car or steamboat, to beaches, ponds, and other places of amusement. The public parks are crowded all day long in summer; and people who go to church in the morning have no scruple about walking or riding for pleasure in the afternoon. These practices were expressly sanctioned by Massachusetts in 1887, and by New Jersey in 1893; and the old law against Sunday visiting has been repealed since 1880 in Vermont.
The newer States have taken care not to pass such absurd statutes. I believe that the majority of our people were willing, as for instance was that prominent Episcopalian, Bishop Potter, to have the Chicago Exposition open on Sundays. Theatres and baseball grounds attract crowds of visitors in our cities, especially those west of the Alleghanies. Whatever changes are made in the East will probably be in the direction of greater liberty. The only question is how fast the present opportunities of recreation ought to be increased.
No one would now agree with Dr. Chalmers in calling the Sabbath "an expedient for pacifying the jealousies of a God of vengeance." Good people have ceased to think, as the Puritans did, that "Pleasures are most carefully to be avoided" on every day of the week, or that "Amity to ourselves is enmity against God." Preachers no longer recommend "abstaining not only from unlawful pleasures, but also from lawful delights." Popular clergymen now say with Dr. Bellows: "Amusement is not only a privilege but a duty, indispensable to health of body and mind, and essential even to the best development of religion itself." "I put amusement among the necessaries and not the luxuries of life." "It is as good a friend to the church as to the theatre, to sound morals and unsuperstitious piety as to health and happiness,... an interest of society which the religious class instead of regarding with hostility and jealousy, ought to encourage and direct." "There is hardly a more baleful error in the world than that which has produced the feud between morality and amusement, piety and pleasure."