p. 87 | Fashionable Soul Saving by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 28, 1871

Fashionable Soul Saving.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

We often wonder, says a writer in the Richmond (Va.) Whig, where the poor go to church. When our blessed Lord delivered that matchless address on the mount, we cannot conceive of the possibility of there being any charge. Those precious utterances—“Blessed are the poor in spirit;” “Blessed are the pure in heart;” “Blessed are the peacemakers”—flowed from those divine lips free as the bounteous air, lavish as the all-pervading light. And so we can imagine the proto-martyr Stephen proclaiming, not only before the Sanhedrim, but to all the people of Jerusalem, without money and without price: “Howbeit the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” There would be something shocking to our ideas of the loftiness and elevation maintained by early missionaries of the cross to associate with their preaching such a thing as “reserved seats” or a “dress circle.”

And yet we have these things in our modern churches. There are particular churches which are recognized as “fashionable.” There is no need there to apprehend anything that will shock the most thoroughbred persons. People are expected to be well—if not elegantly—dressed. The latest bonnets—the most dazzling silks—select them as the most fitting theater for their exhibition. Of course, these privileges have to be paid for. The “best people” are to be found in a certain portion of the church. People who have large families and small incomes get pews near the door and to the right and left of the side aisles. People who have no income—they sit in the gallery—or, most likely, stay at home. It is positively an expensive thing to hear the gospel in our towns.

It is a matter of some surprise to us that some of the more attractive city churches do not set the example of charging an admission fee—say a dollar a head. People who have money are, we take it, just as willing to spend it at church as at the theater, for the same entertainment.

It would at all events be a good idea to combine the two features of rented pews and the sale of tickets for single performances. Strangers (with money of course) often want to go to church, and do not wish to intrude into a private box, and such are perfectly willing to pay seventy-five cents or $1 to hear good music and see the elite of the city.

There is another recommendation we would make to the church, which is this: We would recommend to them to build a number of free churches in the plain quarters of every considerable town for the use of the masses of the people. There are plenty of people with souls to be saved who never have a chance under the present system. They have nowhere to sit, or if they have, they have no fine clothes. They are not willing when they go to church to be reminded that they belong to the poor people. The church is no place for distinction of classes. It is a dead level.

The above from the Cincinnati Times is a sad but truthful picture of the condition of churches and of the poor in the cities. The poor no longer have the gospel preached to them.

Here is something from the same paper that points in the same direction. It is a shame to the cause of Christ.

“THE BAD HABIT OF CHOIRS.—The New York Examiner thus describes a ‘fashionable choir’: The choir-loft ten feet behind and ten feet above the worshipers; then the fourteen sorts of tune-books; then the balustrade to hide the praisers themselves, who come tripping to their places with exuberant satisfaction and demonstrative delight; then their salutations and greetings, which in any other part of the church would be considered intolerably irreverent (therefore the choir-loft is not recognized as a part of the church or the inhabitants a part of the worshipers); then the titter, a disease which is as incurable in choirs as it is inseparable from them; then solemn singing with a background of merry smiles, hilarious nudging and characteristic (not to say choristers’) winks; then a grand reconnoitering of tune-books, accompanied by appropriate whispers, during the prayer or reading the holy Bible, then a literary entertainment, or an exchange of penciled notes on all the great questions that interest the human mind—excepting religion; then the transformation of the choir-loft into a sleeping car, of which the chorister is the conductor, who wakes up his passengers when it is time to go to praising again.”

This ill accords with Paul’s direction for church music. 1 Cor. 14: 15.

D. M. CANRIGHT.