Foreign News: Great Ones of Earth

Dourest and glummest of all Scotch religious sects are the famed “Wee Frees” (Free Church of Scotlanders), bitter-end remnant of the larger and broader Free Church which united with Scotch Presbyterians in 1900. With 92 ministers to guide them, the “Wee Frees” dwell glumly in the mist of the wild highlands, bemoaning their sins, brooding on Hell. Last week the “Wee Frees’ ” Assembly Commission met awesomely at Edinburgh. Before the day was out various Commissioners had censured as “Sabbath-breakers” not only Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald but Their Royal Highnesses the Duke & Duchess of York.

“Members of the Labor Party show a terrible disregard of the Sabbath,” boomed Commissioner Archibald MacNeillage. “They delight in trampling it under foot. Remember that the American Ambassador, Mr. C. G. Dawes, was first received by our Labor Prime Minister on the Sabbath-day! So far as the world knows, the great interest of world peace has not been advanced one iota by that Sabbath-day meeting.”

It was hawk-featured, beetle-browed Commissioner William Fraser of Govan who rose to reveal that “on the Sabbath-day previous to this assembly” the Duke and Duchess of York jointly bestowed medals on ambulance attendants at Forfar on the edge of the Scotch Highlands.

“I propose that we send a resolution to Their Royal Highness,” shrilled Sabbatarian Fraser, “a resolution urging that such an insult to Scotland shall not take place again!”

Eventually the “Wee Frees,” canny and circumspect, passed a purely general resolution. “The Fourth Commandment,” they indisputably proclaimed, “is binding with out exception. . . .” Conscience-stricken citizens thumbed their Bibles, read:

Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee. Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates.