Attacks on the Highland Sabbath puzzle me. The recent debate over Caledonian MacBrayne’s decision to run Sunday sailings between Raasay and Skye vilified the islanders’ right to observe the tradition of the Lord’s day. It may only be a two-mile stretch of water, but it has already divided local communities and the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and prompted Raasay’s minister, Rev James Tallach, into a stern defence of his religion’s Sabbatarian beliefs.

What perturbs me most about the coverage of the new ferry is the bleak Sunday they describe. It bears not the least resemblance to the Lord’s day as I observe it, or the Sabbaths I warmly recall from my childhood.

I never saw cockerels confined beneath a creel, lest they propagate; or a cow muzzled of a Sunday, lest she moo; nor did I attend a Sabbath school where coloured pencils were banned, lest we be inclined to frivolity. Those things must have happened in some other Hebrides. In fact, they almost certainly happened in some Brigadoon of the editorial mind at the Sunday Express.

What I remember are long, serene days of Highland calm and perfect rest; days of special comfort and unusual treats, days given over to the public and private worship of God.

And what I cherish, as an oasis amid the wilderness of the weekly grind and as opportunity to re-boot the hard drive of my mind, is this precious day when, in clear conscience, the television sits unwatched and the radio unheard, the e-mails unknown and the correspondence unread.

Here in the Outer Hebrides, my Sabbath is a day of rest. It is a day like no other. The workaday clothing is laid aside and out comes the soft pinstriped suit, the beautiful shoes polished to a mirror’s gloss the evening before.

Church is at noon — three exuberant singings of Gaelic psalmody reverberating from the rafters as cataracts of music, and a well-argued, closely heeded sermon. At home, a delicious meal of suitably high-day character is prepared with pleasure and eaten with reverential enjoyment.

The evening service follows — English psalms, still sung with heartiness, and another thorough sermon. Later still, the fire is lit, and I may rest by the golden peat-flame with tea and cake and some book of thoughtful and spiritual character.

I do not myself sleep of a Sabbath afternoon but many Highlanders do. One may doze. And one may, quite legitimately, do nothing.

It puzzles me when our Lord’s day is mocked in such terms as it is — an interference with popular liberties; a day of repression and even despotism — because it ignores historic realities and, worse, is bad theology.

The crux of the Fourth Commandment is that we are to do no work. This is a day when, even in the fitful bustle of the 21st century, we are granted carte blanche from the ruthless hum of libertarian capitalism. We are not to toil, shop or trade and we are forbidden from behaving in ways that force others to toil, shop or trade on the Lord’s day.

But the Fourth Commandment is prefaced: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” This is an important and widely overlooked point. The Sabbath existed long before Moses ascended Mount Sinai. It predates the exodus from Egypt and even predates the Jews themselves. The Fourth Commandment is a blessing — specifically, a blessing for the poor, for it was for the poor above all that this weekly rest from labour was appointed.

Perhaps the Sabbath is still so widely upheld in my own part of the world because, until well within living memory, crofters toiled for their daily bread in a ruthless subsistence economy. Amid the terrible destitution that fell on the Isle of Lewis in the 1920s, my great-grandmother (who was then well into her seventies) and her daughter were forced one spring to turn their entire seven-acre croft by spade. They had neither horse nor plough nor menfolk. Who would not cherish a day’s rest in such an existence?

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