Long Fast-Day Services

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 16, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 49.

Long Fast-Day Services

The people of to-day get weary of long services. What would they think of the following described fast-day service of more than 200 years ago: "We went into the church, where, in the first place, a minister made a prayer in the pulpit of full two hours in length, after which an old minister delivered a sermon an hour long, and after that a prayer was made, and some verses sung out of the Psalms. In the afternoon three or four hours were consumed with nothing except prayers, three ministers relieving each other alternately; when one was tired the other went up into the pulpit." Rev. Thomas Clapp, a graduate of Harvard, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, wrote a scheme of prayer containing five divisions with 240 subheads. We need not to say, public prayers should be short.