Dry Docks | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 31, 1872

Dry Docks.

If I believe my senses, I must conclude that the weekly prayer-meetings in very many of our churches are dry-docks into which a certain few church-members are inclosed for weekly repairs.

It is all well enough to have an apparatus in the church for the purpose of putting leaky and fractured Christians in working order. Some people cannot mend themselves. But the difficulty with these ship-yard saints is, they are always on the stocks. They talk of “sustaining” the prayer-meeting. I wonder if they ever think how severe a strain the prayer-meeting experiences to sustain them. Every week they float into their places, and then the air is filled with the noise of the calking and hammering on their cadavarous hulks until every sweeter and pleasanter association is drowned or driven away. Then the worst of it is, shutting themselves away from the free tide, they take to grumbling, not only over their own defects, but over the fact that so few crafts come fresh from fruit and spice-bearing lands with tidings of good cheer to encourage them. They break out in stridulous groans over the wrecks about them, and bewail the willfulness of those who are not disposed to seek the quiet and safe harbor where they lie—safe, but useless.

It may seem to be an unwarranted mixing of figures to make a ship speak, but a groaning craft is no uncommon conception, while the prophet Isaiah says, “Howl, ye ships of Tarshish!”

I tried to get a sensible man of the world to attend one of these gatherings of howling ships. He tried it once, but refused to go a second time. On asking him why, he replied, “These fellows can do me no good—they are always amusing themselves.”

An excellent brother of the ship-yard stamp felt moved to start a prayer-meeting in the neighborhood where he lived, on the plea that there were so many perishing ones thereabouts who were unreached by any saving influences. An excellent move was this, but its object was defeated at the outset by turning the affair into a dry-dock for the tinkering of the saints. Obedient to a widely circulated invitation, a considerable number of saints and some sinners convened. The aged apostle, although he had already enjoyed his weekly tinkering at his own church, could not conceive of a prayer-meeting without the usual accompaniments of oakum, pitch, and calking-irons, hammers, and stocks, so he slipped into the dock and shut the water off, and whined over his own decay and his general sinful and hell-deserving condition. He raised a lamentation over the fact that so few cared enough about religion to come to such an inviting (?) place. He was followed by another and another in nearly the same strain, only adding that their chief business in this world was to get to Heaven, and if God had implanted the principle of grace within their hearts, they would get there. At this juncture, a small steam-tug, fresh from work, came near the “dock,” raised his smokestack, and spake. He said all this wailing he had heard proceeded from the devil; that both sinners and saints showed their good sense in staying away from a place where such noise and creaking alone was to be heard.

MORAL.—It is not profitable to make a ship-yard of the weekly prayer-meeting. Keep the dry-docks and the tinkering at home. Use the pumps more if the craft leaks when at work, but, anyway, keep the canvas to the breeze, and the paddle-wheels in motion, and make the prayer-meeting a quiet harbor into which the souls of the care-worn and the tossed may be sweetly guided, and the joys and triumphs of religion gloriously displayed.— Christian at Work.