Olympic Games

. . . The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord Thy God: in it thou shall not do any work. . . .

FOURTH COMMANDMENT

To Her Majesty Wilhelmina Helena Pauline Maria, Queen of the Netherlands, the Fourth Commandment means exactly what it says and is a specific prohibition against sport on Sunday.

That "sport" is "work" within the meaning of the Lord God is as clear to Queen Wilhelmina as the fact that the Allah of the Mohammedans undoubtedly meant to prohibit "spirituous liquors" when he prohibited "wine." The mere fact that neither "sport," in the modern sense, nor "spirituous liquors" had been invented when the Gods uttered their respective prohibitions is immaterial.

Pious Mohammedans rightly abhor such of their brethren as are so hypocritical as to drink spirits with the alibi that they are not drinking wine. Similarly Queen Wilhelmina has her own pious opinion of people who indulge in sport on Sunday, the Lord God's appointed Day of Rest. Therefore Her Majesty has been put in a quandary by the famed Olympic Games, now being held in Amsterdam with a pagan disregard of Sunday.

Precedent demands that Queen Wilhelmina shall inaugurate the final matches, which will come in early August. Never, since the Olympiad was revived at Athens in 1896, has the Head of any State which has been host*to the Olympians refused to honor them. But last week Queen Wilhelmina voiced the equivalent of a refusal. Firm, logical, pious, she declared her intention of spending a two-months' holiday in Scandinavia. Prudent, she will leave behind to inaugurate the godless Olympiad, her useful Prince Consort, Henry, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

*Hosts: France (1900); the U. S. (1904); Greece (1906); Great Britain (1908); Sweden (1912); Belgium (1920); France (1934).