j-jg ENGLISH SAGA

and family prayers settled down quietly until it was time for
chapel over some special illustrated Sunday magazine: Good
Words, The British Workman, The Band of. Hope, The Sunday
Magazine. These works were not quite as heavy reading as
their titles suggested, for, interspersed with moral sermons
and excerpts from the Scriptures, were serial stories by approved
writers which, published elsewhere, might have been set down
as frivolous and pernicious novels but which, between sacred
covers, took on an almost privileged guise. In the afternoon
the programme of devotional reading and instruction was
repeated: a missionary narrative read aloud by mother after
dinner, Sunday School in the nursery conducted by a nurse, a
Bible lesson from father at four, family tea followed by hymns,
evening <2iapd for the elder children and family prayers again
after supper.

Such was the kind of day of which Macaulay was thinking
when he appealed in the House for proper week-end leisure for th£
factory worker. "We are not poorer but richer because we have,
through many ages, rested from our labour one day in seven. That
day is not lost. While industry is suspended, while the plough lies
in the furrow, while the Exchange is silent, while no smoke
ascends from the factory, a process is going on quite as important
to the wealth of nations as any process which is performed on
more busy days. Man, the machine of machines, the machine
compared with which all the contrivances of the Watts and the
Arkwrights are worthless, is repairing and winding up, so that
he returns to his labours on the Monday with clearer intellect,
with livelier spirits, with renewed corporal vigour."1 He cer-
tainly needed it in that age of strenuous endeavour. Gaining-so
much from the Sabbath rest itself, the respectable middle dass,
whose votes now swayed the legislature, naturally wished to
assure the same blessings for the rest of the populatiod. It was
prepared to use its political power to enforce them.

Sunday observance was one of the salient peaks of the mid-
Victorian scene. On that day over a busy nation there fell an
awfiil calm. Any attempt to relieve it was met by the full terrors
of the canalised English forces of moral righteousness. In 1856
an effort was made by certain scholarly aristocrats to open the
National Gallery and the British Museum on Sunday. The
storm this aroused in .a House of Commons assailed by all the

*Sir G. 0. ttcoefyan, Macauhy //, 1767.