COUGHING DURING SERVICE.

Clutha Leader, Volume II, Issue 59, 26 August 1875, Page 7

COUGHING DURING SERVICE.

Some ofthe best Christian people do not know how to carry themselves in religious assemblage. They never -laugh, they never applaud, they never hiss ; and yet they are great disturbers of public worship. There* is, for instance,, the coughing brigade. If any individual right ought to be maintained at all hazards it. is the. right of coughing. There are' times' when "yon must cough. There is an irresistable tickling in the throat which demands audible demonstration. But there are ways with hand or handkerchief of breaking the repercussion. But how many audiencies have had their peace sacrificed by unrestrained expulsion of air through the glottis. After a sudden change in the weather, there is a fearful charge made by the coughing brigade. They open their mouths wide, and make the arches ring with the racket. They begin with the faint :{ ahem !" and gradually rise and fall through all the scale of dissonance, of much as to say, "Hear, all ye g.,od people, I have a cold. I have an awfully bad cold.. ..Hear how it racks me, tears me, torments me. I took this awfully /bad cold the other night. . I added to it last Sunday. Hear how it goes off There it- is again. 0 dear me. If I only had the syrup of squills, or a mustard plaster., or a woollen stocking turned wrong side around my neck. Brethren and sisters who took cold by sitting in the same draught join the clamour, and it is glottis to glottis, and laryngitis to laryngitis, and a chorus of scrapings and explosions which make the service hidious to a preacher cf sensitive nerves. We have seen people under the pulpit coughing with their mouths open we have 'been tempted to j jump into it. There are some persons | who have, a convenient ecclesiastical cough. It does not trouble them ordinarily, but. when in church you get them thoroughly covered with ' some practical truth, they smother the end of the sentences with -a favorite paroxysm. There is a man in our church who is apt to be taken with one of these fits just as the contribution box comes to him, and he cannot get his breath till he hears the pennies rattling in the box behind him. Cough by all means, but put on the breaks when you come to the down grade, or send the racket through ab least one fold of your pocket handkerchief.