In New Zealand they are days of picnics and junketing, of cheap excursions by train and steamer, of football contests and yachting races, of concerts, theatre matinees, and music hall "grand rational entertainments."
If some of these delights are limited to Good Friday, it is not because Easter Sunday is Easter, but because it is Easter Sunday, and there still haunts the public mind a notion that Sunday retains the awful prerogatives of the Puritan Sabbath.
Our fathers, curiously enough, would have done any or all of these things on Sunday - but first they would have gone to mass.
On Good Friday they would have done none of them.
In due time the mass departed; but not Sunday sports on the village green.
That slobbering Solomon, James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, whom his neighbour Henry I of France accounted "the wisest fool in Europe," gave Sunday sports a new lease.
By royal Declaration he sanctioned for Sunday use after church hours a programme of what in Otago we should call Caledonian Games; and he stipulated that only people who had been to church should take part in them.
His son and successor, Charles I, had this sapient Declaration read in churches.
But the Puritans, who by this time were about to arrive, had it burned by the common hangman.
The Puritans still shape in large degree our thinking about Sunday.
As to Good Friday, and what befits so solemn an anniversary, it is a matter of taste and good feeling. - Civis.
• Not many New Zealanders, perhaps, have ever heard that 70 years ago the whole of the South Island was sold to an Australian for less than 400.
An article in a Sydney paper says William Charles Wentworth, one of the New South Wales pioneers, secured the whole of the Middle Island of New Zealand and 200,000 acres in the North Island for this paltry sum, and some prospective annuities to certain New Zealand chiefs.
Sir George Gipps disallowed the bargain, and the claimant was heard at the Bar of the Legislative Council.
A Court of Claims held that, in 1839, the British Government had made New Zealand a dependency of New South Wales, consequently the alleged purchase was too late to be valid.
- ODT, 25.3.1910.
