Ecclesiastical “Dead Beats.”
By T. De Witt Talmage
The commercial world has a significant term which it applies, not to the unfortunate and the distressed, but to those who are exertionless in their mishap, and who succumb to adversity, expecting others to do for them what they ought to do for themselves. They have a genius for borrowing money. They are persistent bores. You know them a block away, and wish they would always stay at that distance. They are among business men called “dead beats.” Almost every church has an element corresponding with that. These are they who, notwithstanding they have means, pay no pew rent where the pews are let, or contribute nothing where everything is voluntary. They are voluble in prayer, mighty in religious gab, make a big wash, but do nothing for religious institutions. They pray that the pastor may “be blessed in his basket and store,” but do nothing to keep him from starving to death. They do not recognize the fact that there is a religion in giving and a wickedness in withholding. The furnaces would go out for lack of coal, and the lamps for lack of oil, and the church be shut in six weeks, if it depended upon their contribution. The poor must have the gospel preached to them, and the penniless must be welcomed; but there are not more than ten people in any church who cannot give something. If a man cannot give a hundred dollars a year he can give three cents. Woe, then, be to him if he does not give the three cents. We never like to hear a man pray who takes it all out in prayer. It is all folly for a man to pray for the world’s conversion unless he gives something toward it. The man whose income is not more than two hundred dollars a year ought to give some of it to God. One of the great wants of the church everywhere is to get rid of its “dead beats.”—T. De Witt Talmage.