WE, the undersigned Ministers and Representative Elder, members of the Southern Presbytery of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, acting as a Committee of the Presbytery, respectfully beg to represent to you, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Home Affairs, our profound concern on account of the increasing inroads being made in our day on the sanctity of the Sabbath, and more especially at this time in view of the new attempt which, according to press reports, is contemplated in certain quarters to obtain legal sanction for the opening of theatres on the Lord’s Day.
Holding as we do the duty of Sabbath observance to be commanded by God and of moral and perpetual obligation, we feel bound to regard any appropriation of this day or of part of it to the purposes of worldly entertainment a breach of the Divine law and one highly offensive to the Most High and provocative of His displeasure. To what extent Sabbath desecration has already, in a casual way, contributed to the present distress, we believe will one day be ascertained. It seems to us indisputable that, under the government of a beneficent God, the abounding unhappiness of the world in these days must be related to abounding spiritual evils, and none appears to us more rampant and more recklessly indulged than this one. What the future consequences will be if the trend, now so strongly established, towards the secularisation of the Lord’s Day, and the decline in vital religion which it entails, continue unchecked, we shrink from contemplating. If the ways by which as a generation we have wandered so far in recent times from Scriptural standards such as those of Sabbath observance have already led us into trouble of so grievous and desolating a kind, what will the end be if these ways are daringly and defiantly held on to?
We believe our rulers have an important duty to discharge in this connection and that the time is past being ripe for the Government to give the subject their particular attention and to adopt a strong and uncompromising attitude for the safeguarding of the Sabbath institution. It is in the faith of this we address our representation to you, sir, in the hope that you will give it earnest consideration and use your influence with the Government and in Parliament to ensure that this latest contemplated attack on the Lord’s Day does not succeed.