Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1931. AN 88,794-WORD SERMON

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 138, 13 June 1931, Page 12

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1931. AN 88,794-WORD SERMON

The great country which spends so much." of its time in "whipping: creation" has now made a singular addition to its laurels. Tho Rev. George Brown, coloured pastor of the Mount Zion Baptist Church) claims to have preached the longest; sermon on record —one of twelve hours ten minutes. He preached, on Sunday a total of 88,794 words. Four lamb chops, a leg of chicken, and a glass of milk sustained him through the ordeal. He had at least five subjects. Beginning - about noon with, "Gambling," he disposed of it in three hours, and then "Companionate Marriage" must have had a considerably longer term, for we are told that it "carried him along untildark." "Pro-hibition"-and "Evil Dancing" pleasantly beguiled the early hours of the morning, after which what must have been a much less congenial subject for a hot gospeller received the preacher's attention, and " 'Famine' took him until 10 o'clock." Suiting the action to the word, he marked the conclusion of this part of his*discourse by finishing the chicken, but of the thirst which might have been expected to be a more serious difficulty there is no record. That glass of milk, we are expressly told, "sustained him through the ordeal," and as it must be presumed to have been unfortified .its .operation was highly creditable to both parties.; If we may be pardoned for .slightly . improving the words of the poet, we might say to the preacher: , .

Drought was not in your throat, Languor was not in your heart, , Weakness was not in your word, .Weariness not on your brow. In trie plain prose of our cabled ireport, the preacher, having " settled famine's business and finished ' his chicken, "resumed strongly and preached until midnight." It was a truly magnificent perform-ance-—a sermon that extended to 88,794' words and tpok twelve hours and ten minutes to deliver, and if may well be that the Rev. George Brown is right in his claim that it is the'longest on record. .But, whether that be so or not, we trust that, instead of hunting for precedents that may diminish his glory, or cavilling at the' time-keeping or the counting, British preachers will seriously contemplate the challenge of their coloured brother, and, if they cannot hope to emulate him, will at least find in it a call'to improvement. In his "Pulpit Table-talk," which was written about sixty years ago, Dean Ramsay estimated that there were 37,520 churches in Great Britain. , Now in some of these, he said, one sermon only is preached; in a good many three are preached, and in most two. So that giving two weekly sermons to each would be a fair andperhaps a low average. This makes 75,040 sermons / delivered' every Sab-bath-day in the 'churches of Great Britain alone,'or the enormous number of 3,902,080 —i.e., nearly four millions of sermons during tho year! : Though the number of sermons may be about the same to-day, their duration, t which ranged probably from about half an hour to an hour in Dean Ramsay's time, has now been cut by about 50 per cent. But if the whittling-down process could be reversed, and the twelve-hour measure which was proclaimed as with a trumpet from the Mount Zion pulpit on Sunday last could be made the standard, how much more impressive would the Dean's figures become! You would have to multiply 3,902,----080 by 88,794—"a thing imagination boggles at" and the ordinary man's mathematics will also boggle at —in order to arrive at the number of words that would be preached every Sunday from the pulpits of Britain. Yet it is to be feared that Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, which at present are hopelessly outclassed in the competition, are likely to remain so, and instead of giving the nation a lead will decline to measure their spiritual work by a mathematical standard. There is much to be said for the hustle and the mass production which are of the essence of America's industrial methods, and, as Mr. James Truslow Adams -pointed out, in an ' article which wo reviewed a' few days ago, the British manufacturer pays dearly for his obstinate adherence to older, and slower methods, and to his preference of quality to quantity. But in religion- the ordinary American will, of course, agree with the Englishman in putting quality first. The things of the spirit must, as St. Paul says, be "spiritually discerned." They cannot be gauged by the stopwatch and the official count.

The Rev. George Brown's strange enterprise rather suggests comparison with some of those American extravagances which have no spiritual pretensions at all, and often outrage good sense and sometimes good taste. To walk backwards from New York to San Francisco, to wheel a barrow

from San Francisco to New York, to see who can sit it out longest on the top of a pole—these 'are undertakings iii which America has even less to fear from the competition of the world than in industry and commerce. We append a few recent examples, mostly taken .from those volumes of, ."Americana" in which Mr. H. L. Mencken delights to. gibbet the follies of the least intelligent of his countrymen: — SOUTH CALIFORNIA. So successful was tho mustache growing contest won by tho Lions Club oJ; Anaheim against the" Lions Club of Ontario that when tho silver loving mustache cup was handed to the winning team it was decided to have tho words "first annual" incorporated in the inscription. The contest staited thirty days ago and torminatod when a committee of six women judges reviewed the exhibits offered by seventy men in the Valley' Club at Pomona. To determine the winners the judges used calipers, magnifying glasses, and T-squares. MORGANTOWN: WEST VIRGINIA. • After a practice session last week during which he devoured two cheese sandwiches, six pork chops, one large loaf of Italian bread, a dish of lettuce salad, and another loaf of bread, Louis Tsirigotis, owner of a lunch wagon, has. announced that he will go after the world's eating record some time ■ this week. His tentative menu includes twelve pounds of fish, four loaves'.of bread, fivo ,cups of coffee, and two dozen eggs. Police officers will referee the contest. JANESBOEOUGH: GEORGIA. D-H won a "tobacco chewing marathon" against .45 other competitors. He chewed without ceasing for two days and. a half when doctors stopped him to pKcvent lock-jaw. GROTON: SOUTH DAKOTA.: C. S. Carter won the pancake-eating championship of South Dakota last night. Ho ate fifty-one c'ake3 in 0.35 flat, the < time. allotted by the local church committee in. charge of tho affair. He bettered by eight the record set a few moments earlier by W. P. G. Meyers. . ■ ' . ' GALVESTON: TEXAS. Approximately sixty Xiwanians and ladies,, attended the ladies ', night cab-aret-vaudeville programme given at Gaido's. At the conclusion of the programme a handshaking contest was staged, wherein all .men were required to shake, hands, with as many ladies as they could in the space of one minute. J. M. Parke won with a total of seventy-four handshakings. -ENTERPRISE: MISSOURI. ' They paid off, a church debt down at North Greenfield Church, near Springfield, the other night with a hugging social.^ Eight hundred people attended, and 75 dollars was raised. The rates: Girls under 15, for a two-minute hug, 15 cents. Girls 15 to 20, same for 25 cents. Girls 20 to 25, same for 50 cents. Other men's wives, same for 75 cents. ' Old maids, three cents and no time limit.

YTTCAIPA: CALIFORNIA; A burst of applause greeted the Rcvl E. Haley when he concluded the Book of Revelations (sic) in the annual nonstop Bible-reading ceremony here at 9.29 last night. The completion of the ceremony bettered the mark of last year by twenty minutes, the , total time taken being 69 hours 20 minutes. The last of these examples, which seems to have eluded the malicious vigilance of Mr. Mencken, comes nearest to the Rev. G. Brown's homiletic "Marathon" on Sunday, but it is noteworthy that some of the more dubious of the others were under church auspices. The most glaring example of the American capacity to run the commercial and the spiritual in double harness seems, however, to be the exploitation of Easter sunrise services for the purposes of business. A public invitation to one of these .services' in Southern California a few years ago was in the following terms:— , BEFORE THE MAGIC CITY RISES. [ You can never do it again. You will cherishiit as a memory of having been in close personal touch with big things in'the making, and of having known just what the condition was bofore the change-... To be on Peace Temple Hill is to worship. Come in prayerful but joy-' ful'thought and worship—and sing the old songs. • Thirty acres of poppies have bsen planted for the occasion—we hope they will be out. : - ■ A chorus of several hundred voices will be supported "by a fifty-pjiece orchestra. Cornets, playing Easter carols, at the Canyon and on the hill-tops will point the way. Come and let us spend an hour with God in this beautiful place, holding fast the simple and deeply spiritual significance of the day. -' , ■■ There is room, for any number of automobiles. You can sit in' them if you wish. But bo sure to climb the hill and get the wholo magnificent view before you leave. ■ Please be there before 5.15 a.m. Information 661-02. 0 death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? He is" not here: fof He is risen. In "The Raven on the Skyscraper," from which our quotation is taken, Mr. and Mrs. Paul King comment as follows:— '■ The promoters of this frolic claimed severely'that it was not "denominational."- Of course not 1 Anyone could see that it was financial and Jewish". The practically minded owners of highly desirable land on "Peace Temple Hill" thought that it might be "a paying proposition to take advantage of Christian effervescence at Eastertide."