Page:Melbourne and Mars.djvu/97

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LIFE IN SIDONIA.
95

worship. No dust, no heat, no noise nor jar. No grinding toil, no anxiety regarding business, no money, no poverty, no burdensome riches; plenty for all and all nearly as free us water or air. No demands to meet except twenty hours a week of labor and that itself be much a privilege that those to whom it was denied owing to mental or physical incapacity are the only sufferers or nearly so. Women and men are free and equal; a woman, does not resign her name or any social right. She has her voice in selecting a representative for either District or Central Executives and from within that body her vote in selecting the most suitable from the selected. Nothing but disablement or transference can remove a member, hence the best three are selected and one elected for a council wants some voice in picking men whom it can not send away. The fifth day is the Sabbath and every kind of work stops that can by any possibility be allowed to stop that the people can attend morning Thanksgiving and be free to spend the day as they please. They do not travel that day except on foot or by private air boat; because they will not partake of any pleasure that deprives another of his chance of enjoying the same. They cannot endure the picture of one man working for the gratification of two or three more. Still this altruism works two ways; any man if asked would work for the benefit of the rest or even to minister to others pleasure. The religious life of the community is free from sectarianism and free from cant. Little is said regarding the ten commandments but the eleventh is always obeyed. No one will wrong another. The religious faith may best be defined as a pure Theism and the worship is mostly musical and full of praise and thanksgiving. It is catered into by all with great heartiness. In Summer and even in Winter if the weather is fine and dry worship is conducted in amphitheatres. One near the junction of the avenues will seat twenty-five thousand people and when used it is filled. An orchestra of two hundred performers is backed up by a trained choir of a thousand voices, and in the parts of the service that allows of both priest and people speaking in unison the effect is overwhelming.

At least Frankston so defines it. Says he, "My little village ideas were all sent adrift. When I got through a long wide passage at the level of the street I found myself with about three or four thousand more people at one end of a great oval. The other half of the oval was occupied by a high platform for a reader; he was near the centre of the vast assemblage. Looking up on both sides I saw seven galleries separated from each other by broad, shallow flights of steps. One gallery was opposite the priest and would seat four thousand people; then there were three, more on each aide capable of holding each three thousand more. In the oval where I was there were no seats but four thousand could stand comfortably.

I went in to see one of the Sabbath morning sights of Sidonia, and up to this time I had not regarded public worship as a thing of much account. I had been inside the walls about three minutes when I saw the man in the