Long Salaries and Short Sermons by Dudley Marvin Canright

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 22, 1877

Long Salaries and Short Sermons.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

YESTERDAY I attended a popular church in the city. It is a very fine church. It is cushioned, and carpeted, and frescoed, has a fine choir, and everything in style. The little society who own it have also a very fine debt of twenty thousand dollars hanging over it. The pastor is evidently an accomplished scholar, precise in every way, just what a modern, popular church require. His salary is five or six times that which our ministers receive. He preaches twice a week, and very exhausting indeed, must be his arduous labors, if they are all the sort I witnessed.

He arose and read from manuscript. It was a very nicely written essay, worded very precisely, very prettily, but it sounded very much like many an essay which I have heard young students read when they were practicing in school. He read it very quietly, without the least emotion, and as though he did not expect it would move anybody in particular, and in this he evidently was not disappointed. The reading of it took just seventeen minutes by my watch. That was called the sermon for Sunday morning. Another one at evening of the same length would make thirty-four minutes talk which his church receives in one week. At this rate they get about one hours sermon in two weeks, while our ministers preach from an hour to an hour and a quarter every sermon and with as much earnestness in one discourse as this man would manifest in a whole year.

This is a fair sample of modern sermons. I attended another church in this same city but a short time ago and heard another dry essay read. The reading occupied just fifteen minutes. How much burden of soul can these men have? Just none at all. Evidently they put in just as little labor as will do to secure their position and get their pay.

D. M. CANRIGHT.