Around The Tea-Table Part 21

I do not know which word is the worst. It is the national habit in literature and religion to call that sensationalism which we ourselves cannot do. If an author write a book that will not sell, he is apt to charge the books of the day which do succeed as being sensational. There are a great many men who, in the world and the Church, are dead failures, who spend their time in letting the public know that they are not sensationalists. The fact is that they never made any stir while living, nor will they in dying, save as they rob the undertaker of his fees, they not leaving enough to pay their dismission expenses.

I hate sensationalism in the pulpit so far as that word means the preaching of everything but the gospel, but the simple fact is that whenever and wherever faith and repentance and heaven and h.e.l.l are proclaimed with emphasis there will be a sensation. The people in our great cities are hungry for the old gospel of Christ. If our young men in the ministry want large audiences, let them quit philosophizing, and hair-splitting, and botanizing, and without gloves take hold of men's sins and troubles, and there will be no lack of hearers. Stagnation is worse than sensationalism.

I have always noticed that just in proportion as a man cannot get along himself he is fearful of some one else making an excitement. Last week a mud-turtle down by the brook opened its sh.e.l.l and discoursed to a horse that was coming down to drink. The mud-turtle said to the horse: "Just as I get sound asleep you are sure to come past and wake me up. We always used to have a good quiet time down here in the swamp till you got in the habit of thumping along this way. I am conservative and like to keep in my sh.e.l.l.

I have been pastor of thirteen other mud-turtles, and we always had peace until you came, and next week at our semi-annual meeting of mud-turtles we shall either have you voted a nuisance or will talk it over in private, eight, or ten of us, which will probably be the more prudent way." Then the mud-turtle's sh.e.l.l went shut with a snap, at which the horse kicked up his heels as he turned to go up to the barn to be harnessed to a load of corn that was ready for the market.

Let us all wake up and go to work. There are in the private members.h.i.+p of our churches and in the ministry a great many men who are dead, but have never had the common decency to get buried. With the harvest white and "lodging" for lack of a sickle, instead of lying under the trees criticising the sweating reapers who are at work, let us throw off our own coat and go out to see how good a swathe we can cut.

Myself.--You seem, Dominie Scattergood, though you have been preaching a great while, to be very healthy and to have a sound throat.

Scattergood.--Yes; I don't know any reason why ministers should not be as well as other persons. I have never had the ministers' sore throat, but have avoided it by the observance of two or three rules which I commend to you of less experience. The drug stores are full of troches, lozenges and compounds for speakers and singers. All these medicines have an important mission, but how much better would it be to avoid the ills than to spend one's time in trying to cure them!

1. Speak naturally. Let not incompetent elocutionists or the barbarisms of custom give you tones or enunciations at war with those that G.o.d implanted.

Study the vocal instrument and then play the best tune on it possible, but do not try to make a flute sound like a trumpet, or a bagpipe do the work of a violin.

2. Remember that the throat and lungs were no more intended to speak with than the whole body. If the vocal organs get red hot during a religious service, while the rest of the body does not sympathize with them, there will be inflammation, irritation and decay. But if the man shall, by appreciation of some great theme of time and eternity, go into it with all his body and soul, there will be an equalization of the whole physical organism, and bronchitis will not know whether to attack the speaker in his throat, right knee or left ankle, and while it is deciding at what point to make a.s.sault the speaker will go scot-free. The man who besieges an audience only with his throat attempts to take a castle with one gun, but he who comes at them with head, eyes, hand, heart, feet, unlimbers against it a whole park of artillery. Then Sebastopol is sure to be taken.

Myself.--I notice, Dominie, that your handwriting is not as good as your health. Your letter in reply to my invitation to be here was so indistinct that I could not tell whether it was an acceptance or a declinature.

Scattergood.--Well, I have not taken much care of my autograph. I know that the attempt has been made to reduce handwriting to a science. Many persons have been busy in gathering the signatures of celebrated men and women. A Scotchman, by the name of Watson, has paid seventy-five thousand dollars for rare autographs. Rev. Dr. Sprague, of Albany, has a collection marvelous for interest.

After we read an interesting book we want to see the author's face and his autograph. But there is almost always a surprise or disappointment felt when for the first time we come upon the handwriting of persons of whom we have heard or read much. We often find that the bold, das.h.i.+ng nature sometimes wields a trembling pen, and that some man eminent for weakness has a defiant penmans.h.i.+p that looks as if he wrote with a splinter of thunderbolt.

I admit that there are instances in which the character of the man decides the style of his penmans.h.i.+p. Lord Byron's autograph was as reckless as its author. George Was.h.i.+ngton's signature was a reflection of his dignity. The handwriting of Samuel Rogers was as smooth as his own nature. Robespierre's fierce-looking autograph seems to have been written with the dagger of a French revolution.

On the contrary, one's handwriting is often the antipodes of his character.

An unreasonable schoolmaster has often, by false instruction, cramped or ruined the pupil's chirography for ever. If people only knew how a brutal pedagogue in the academy used to pull my ears while learning to write, I should not be so often censured for my own miserable scribble. I defy any boy to learn successfully to make "hooks and trammels" in his copy-book, or ever after learn to trace a graceful calligraphy, if he had "old Talyor"

bawling over him. I hope never to meet that man this side of heaven, lest my memory of the long-ago past be too much for the sense of ministerial propriety.

There are great varieties of circ.u.mstances that influence and decide the autograph. I have no faith in the science of chirography. I could, from a pack of letters in one pigeon-hole, put to rout the whole theory. I have come to the conclusion that he who judges of a man's character by his penmans.h.i.+p makes a very poor guess. The boldest specimen of chirography I ever received was from a man whose wife keeps him in perpetual tremor, he surrendering every time she looks toward the broomstick.

Myself.--What do you think, Dominie, of the fact that laymen have begun to preach? and what is your opinion of the work they are doing in Scotland?

For the first time in many a day the old Dominie grew sarcastic, and said:

What are we coming to? Get out your fire-engines. There is a conflagration.

What work Messrs. Moody, Sankey, Phillips, Bliss, Jacobs, Burnell, Durant and fifty other laymen have done. Wherever they go they have large concourses of people, and powerful revivals of religion follow. Had we not better appoint a meeting of conference or presbytery to overhaul these men who are saving souls without license? No! What we want is ten thousand men just like them, coming up from among the people, with no professional garb, and hearts hot with religious fervor, and bound by no conventionalities or stereotyped notions about the way things ought to be done.

I have a sly suspicion that the layman who has for seven years given the most of his time to the study of the truth is better prepared to preach the gospel than a man who has given that length of time in theological seminaries to the study of what other people say about the Bible. In other words, we like water just dipped from the spring, though handed in a gourd, rather than water that has been standing a week in a silver pitcher.

After Calvin has twisted us one way, and Arminius has twisted us another, and we get our head full of the old Andover and New Haven theological fights, and the difference between Ante-Nicene Trinitarianism and Post-Nicene Trinitarianism, it is a luxury to meet some evangelist who can tell us in our common mother-tongue of Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost.

I say let our learned inst.i.tutions push theological education to its highest excellency, preparing men for spheres which none but the cultured and scholarly are fit for, but somehow let us beat the drum and gather a battalion of lay-workers. We have enough wise men to tell us about fishes, about birds, about rocks, about stars--enough Leyden jars, enough telescopes, enough electric batteries; but we have not more than one man where we ought to have a hundred to tell the story of Christ and the soul.

Some cry out, "It is dangerous to have laymen take such prominent positions in the Church." Dangerous to what? Our dignity, our prerogatives, our clerical rights? It is the same old story. If we have a mill on the stream, we do not want some one else to build a mill on the same stream. It will take the water off our wheel. But, blessed be G.o.d! the river of salvation is deep and strong enough to grind corn for all nations.

If a pulpit is so weak that the wave of religious zeal on the part of the laity submerges it, then let it go under. We cannot expect all other s.h.i.+pping to forsake the sea lest they run down our craft. We want more watchmen on the wall, more sentinels at the gate, more recruits for the field. Forward the whole Christian laity! Throw up no barrier to their advancement. Do not hang the Church until dead by the neck with "red-tape."

I laughed outright, though I ought to have cried, when I read in one of our papers a statement of the work of Moody and Sankey in Edinburgh, which statement closed with the luscious remark that "Probably the Lord is blessing their work." I never saw a word put in more awkward and forced and pitiable predicament than that word probably. While heaven and earth and h.e.l.l have recognized the stupendous work now going on in Scotland under G.o.d and through the instrumentality of these American evangelists, a correspondent thinks that probably something has happened.

Oh how hard it is to acknowledge that men are doing good if they do not work in our way and by our methods! One's heart must have got awfully twisted and near being d.a.m.ned who can look on a great outpouring of the Holy Ghost and have any use for probabilities. The tendency is even among Christians to depreciate that which goes on independent of themselves and in a way oppugnant to their personal taste. People do not like those who do a thing which they themselves have not been able to accomplish.

The first cry is, "The people converted are the lower population, and not the educated." We wonder if five hundred souls brought to Christ from the "Cowgate" and "Coalhole," and made kings and priests unto G.o.d, and at last seated on thrones so high they will not be able to reach down with their foot to the crown of an earthly monarch, is not worth some consideration?

Then the cry is, "They will not hold out." Time only will show that.

They are doing all they can. You cannot expect them to hold out ten years in six weeks. The most faithful Christians we have ever known were brought in through revivals, and the meanest, stingiest, dullest, hardest-to-get-on-with Christians have joined when the church was dead.

When a candidate for admission comes before session in revival times, I ask him only seven or eight questions; but when he comes during a cold state of religion, I ask him twenty questions, and get the elders to ask him as many more. In other words, I have more faith in conversions under special religious influence than under ordinary.

The best luck I ever had in fis.h.i.+ng was when I dropped the net in the bay and brought up at one haul twenty bluefish, with only three or four moss-bunkers, and the poorest luck I ever had was when, after standing two hours in the soggy meadow with one hook on the line, I felt I had a bite, and began to pull, more and more persuaded of the great size of the captive, until I flung to the sh.o.r.e a snapping-turtle. As a gospel fisherman I would rather run the risk of a large haul than of a solitary angling. I can soon sort out and throw overboard the few moss-bunkers.

Oh for great awakenings all over Christendom!

We have had a drought so long we can stand a freshet. Let the Hudson and the Thames and the Susquehanna rise and overflow the lowlands, and the earth be full of the knowledge of G.o.d as the waters fill the seas. That time is hastening, probably!

CHAPTER LXI.

FAMILY PRAYERS.

Take first the statement that unless our children are saved in early life they probably never will be. They who go over the twentieth year without Christ are apt to go all the way without Him. Grace, like flower-seed, needs to be sown in spring. The first fifteen years of life, and often the first six, decide the eternal destiny.

The first thing to do with a lamb is to put it in the arms of the Great Shepherd. Of course we must observe natural laws. Give a child excessive meat diet, and it will grow up sensual, and catechism three times a day, and sixty grains in each dose, won't prevent it. Talk much in your child's presence about the fas.h.i.+ons, and it will be fond of dress, notwithstanding all your lectures on humility. Fill your house with gossip, and your children will tattle. Culture them as much as you will, but give them plenty of money to spend, and they will go to destruction.

But while we are to use common sense in every direction respecting a child, the first thing is to strive for its conversion, and there is nothing more potent than family prayers. No child ever gets over having heard parents pray for him. I had many sound thres.h.i.+ngs when I was a boy (not as many as I ought to have had, for I was the last child and my parents let me off), but the most memorable scene in my childhood was father and mother at morning and evening prayers. I cannot forget it, for I used often to be squirming around on the floor and looking at them while they were praying.

Your son may go to the ends of the earth, and run through the whole catalogue of transgression, but he will remember the family altar, and it will be a check, and a call, and perhaps his redemption.

Family prayers are often of no use. Perhaps they are too hurried. We have so much before us of the day's work that we must hustle the children together. We get half through the chapter before the family are seated. We read as if we were reading for a wager. We drop on our knees, are in the second or third sentence before they all get down. It is an express train, with amen for the first depot. We rush for the hat and overcoat, and are on the way to the store, leaving the impression that family prayers are a necessary nuisance, and we had better not have had any gathering of the family at all. Better have given them a kiss all around; it would have taken less time and would have been more acceptable to G.o.d and them.

Family prayers often fail in adaptedness. Do not read for the morning lesson a genealogical chapter, or about Samson setting the foxes' tails on fire, or the prophecy about the horses, black and red, and speckled, unless you explain why they were speckled. For all the good your children get from such reading, you might as well have read a Chinese almanac. Rather give the story of Jesus, and the children climbing into his arms, or the lad with the loaves and fishes, or the Sea of Galilee dropping to sleep under Christ's lullaby.

Stop and ask questions. Make the exercise so interesting that little Johnny will stop playing with his shoe-strings, and Jenny will quit rubbing the cat's fur the wrong way. Let the prayer be pointed and made up of small words, and no wise information to the Lord about things He knows without your telling Him. Let the children feel they are prayed for. Have a hymn if any of you can sing. Let the season be spirited, appropriate and gladly solemn.

Family prayer also fails when the whole day is not in harmony with it. A family prayer, to be worth anything, ought to be twenty-four hours long. It ought to give the pitch to all the day's work and behavior. The day when we get thoroughly mad upsets the morning devotion. The life must be in the same key with the devotion.

Family prayer is infinitely important. If you are a parent, and are not a professor of religion, and do not feel able to compose a prayer, get some one of the many books that have been written, put it down before you, and read prayers for the household. G.o.d has said that He will "pour out His fury upon the family that call not upon His name."

Prayer for our children will be answered. My grandmother was a praying woman. My father's name was David. One day, he and other members of the family started for a gay party. Grandmother said: "Go, David, and enjoy yourself; but all the time you and your brothers and sisters are there, I will be praying for you." They went, but did not have a very good time, knowing that their mother was praying for them.

The next morning, grandmother heard loud weeping in the room below. She went down and found her daughter crying violently. What was the matter? She was in anxiety about her soul--an anxiety that found no relief short of the cross. Word came that David was at the barn in great agony. Grandmother went and found him on the barn floor, praying for the life of his soul.

The news spread to the neighboring houses, and other parents became anxious about their children, and the influence spread to the village of Somerville, and there was a great turning unto G.o.d; and over two hundred souls, in one day, stood up in the village church to profess faith in Christ. And it all started from my grandmother's prayer for her sons and daughters. May G.o.d turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest He come and smite the earth with a curse!