DISTURBERS OF WORSHIP

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 22, 1877

DISTURBERS OF WORSHIP.

Give a preacher a good “send off” when he begins his sermon, and then listen attentively, and in nine cases out of ten you will be rewarded with an interesting and instructive discourse. Many things done by thoughtless and indiscreet hearers perplex and annoy the sensitive preacher, and where there is little sensitiveness there is little sense. I will point out briefly some of the individuals who trouble the minister, and disturb the devotion of the well-behaved and devout hearer.

1. Those who are late. They are not all alike, for some have been detained by sickness and unforeseen accident; but the habitual late comer is sure to stalk up the aisle during the service, and his squeaking boots proclaim his arrival, and call the attention of the auditors to his Sabbath suit and the fine figure it covers. The noise he makes adds discord to music, and introduces a vein of thought not in unison with sacred worship, and provokes criticism not complimentary to his taste and judgment. Business men say in the silent speech of reflection, “He is not on time here, and cannot be depended upon when he makes a contract in trade.” In that way his name and presence become associated with broken engagements, unpaid bills, and protested notes.

2. Those who cough needlessly. Those whose bodily afflictions and infirmities make coughing a necessity are not included in these strictures. A large number of persons have a habit of yielding to the slightest irritation of the throat. The juice of the mouth, the saliva, would, if used, moisten the membrane of the throat, and the exercise of the will would completely conquer the inclination to cough; but one begins to bark, the habit becomes contagious, and those who are never heard in any other way in public attract attention by making an unpleasant sound, which is neither a sob nor a shout. A sermon punctuated with coughs is almost as unintelligible as the speech of the drunken man, which contains as many hic-coughs as syllables. The minister makes a fine point which is lost in a cough. He is eloquent, but his rhetoric is spoiled, and the climax is crowned with a cough. He touches the heart with his pathos, and moves the intellect with his passionate logic, but the effect has been irretrievably impaired by a needless cough.

3. Inattentive hearers. Men and women who claim the advantage of education and culture, will do in church what they would not do in their parlors. They will shut their eyes, and put down their heads when a friend, and that friend their pastor, is talking to them. They would not insult a stranger in their drawing-rooms by going to sleep when he is conversing with them, and yet they will indulge the habit of sleeping in church when the minister is delivering to them a message which cost him a week of hard work. Such bad manners come close to the border line of bad morals, save in those instances in which sleep is a disease which the vigilance of the afflicted fails to cure. Men who never sleep at their desks, who are wide awake on the street and at places of amusement, need not seek to conceal themselves behind an excuse for sleeping in church. It often signifies too much eating and too little appreciation.

4. Those who leave during service. Sickness and positive engagements may make it necessary for a hearer to leave church before the conclusion of the services. I have no reproof for them. I refer to the little vessels that soon fill up and run over and run out—to the unquiet hearers who go to church to see and be seen, and who make themselves conspicuous by their impatience and noise. Perhaps they are offended because the preacher has uttered an unpopular sentiment, and they seek to advertise their anger and parade their opposition to his views by leaving the church abruptly. There are men of narrow minds, who endeavor to control the minister by their down-sitting and uprising, their incoming and their out-going, but they only make themselves prominently ridiculous and conspicuously foolish.

5. Those who are critical. Some hearers are nothing unless they are critical. Slips of the tongue are nuts for them to crack. Mistakes of any kind are sure to be noticed by them, and they are sure to let the minister know how sharp they are at discovering the mishaps and accidents that may overtake a man that is in the pulpit. “To err is human.” The other part of the quotation is not known to them. These maudlin critics are not all qualified for the task they assume. In the words of Miss Emily Faithful, they have been dipped in a thin solution of useless accomplishments, and know just enough to annoy those whose mission is to teach the lesson of eternal truth. Nothing pleases them so much as a misquotation or the literary blunder of a minister, unless it might be an act of immorality. I might add to this list those who whisper in church loud enough to attract notice, those who bang their books into the pew boxes, those who scrape the footstools upon the church floor, and those who spit tobacco juice where there is no receptacle for it.—Christian Intelligencer.