SOPORIFICS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 15, 17 July 1937, Page 24

SOPORIFICS

SERMONS AND BOOKS

SLEEPING IN CHURCH

AND STAYING AWAKE AT NIGHT

(Written for the "Evening Post" by A.M.)

The Sydney Methodist minister who, as reported in the "Evening Post" last week, has announced that any member of his flock falling asleep during the sermon will be provided with a volume of rousing detective stories, has revived an old question: "Why is it so easy to sleep in church?" The question is at least as old as Dean Swift, who delivered a sermon on it. The Dean's text was the young man in Acts who slept while Paul preached, fell from a height, and was taken up dead, to be brought to life by the Apostle.

I have chosen these words with design. If possible, to disturb some part in this audience of half an hour's sleep, for iha convenience and exercise whereof, this place, at this season of the day, is very much celebrated. . . .

Tho accident which happened to this young man in the text hath not been sufficient to discourage his successors: but, because the preachers now in the world, however they'may exceed St. Paul in the art of setting men to sleep, dv .nnreineiy tall short of him in the working of miracles; therefore men are hcconie so cautious as to choose Llnu safe and convenient stations and postures for taking their repose, without hazard of their persons.

•The Sydney minister believes, however, that if the congregation falls asleep the preacher.is to blame. Perhaps he is, but I doubt if this is the sole explanation of that dreadful sleepiness that so often overtakes one in church. I have been seized with it in the middle of sermons that should have held my attention, and, fighting against the enemy, I had a dreadful vision of going to sleep and creating a scandal by waking up noisily from a nightmare. I think dim religious light, what may be called the psychology of church, and poor ventilation, may have something to do with it, but the preacher could retort, with a good deal of force, that men rarely fall asleep in a. theatre. As a matter of fact Swift used this very illustration in rebuke. THE OLD LONG SERMON DAYS. After all it is not asking much of a congregation to expect them to listen to a sermon for half an hour. One frequently goes to lectures knowing that the discourse will last much, longer. And, as sermons go, or have gone, half an hour is not very long. Two hours used to be common in Scotland. A biographer of Barrie, describing conditions before Barries time, says:— Barrie himself tells us that in Frist-days in Kirrierauir, in that earlier part of the century of which he writes, tho sorvice began on Saturday at two, and lasted until nearly seven o'clock, during which time two sermons were preached with no interval between. On Sunday tho Sacrament was dispensed, and the service, which included a long series of especially lons prayers, ■ lasted from eleven in the morning till six; and nt half past another two hours' service began either in the kirk or on the common, "from which no one who thought much about his immortal soul would have dared ■ (or cared) to absent himself."

Think of that, you degenerate folk •who judge your vicar to be an excellent preacher because he keeps the sermon down to fifteen or twenty minutes. Think of: the discipline these long sermons must have been to the Scottish people. It, is no wonder they have cultivated the mind and conquered England and the British Empire. A ve_ry gifted Church of England clergyman whom I knew said he preached until the third person yawned. •He was once visited by a clergyman even more unconventional than himself, who, just before the service, asked what was the usual length of the sermon, and was told of the local rule. Imagine the excitement in the congregation when the visiting preacher suddenly stopped his discourse and said: "Your vicar tells me that he preaches till the third person has yawned. 'And now to God the Father, etc'" SLEEP BANISHEKS. Sleep remains very much the mystery it was to Henry IV, who remarked that his poorest subjects could sleep but he couldn't. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" was his explanation, and worry is probably , at the root of most sleeplessness among the unexalted as well as the exalted. It is ironical and maddening that one should be assaulted by sleep in church and be kept at arm's length by it in bed. The Sydney clergyman prescribes "Memoirs of Vidocq" for those assailed by this enemy. Unfortunately one cannot very well take out such a book in the middle of a sermon and read it, and when church is over, where is the occasion for it? You may find it almost impossible to keep awake in company with a bore over a fire, but again it is impossible to pull out a book and bury yourself in it. The fact is that one seldom wishes to lake special measures to keep awake, but fairly frequently one wishes to do something to woo sleep. I suppose there are a good many books that are calculated to banish sleep—"The Prisoner of Zenda" for example, "The Hound of the Baskervilles," "The Moonstone," anything by Agatha Christie —yet a relatively tame book may hold a man from sleep if he is really interested in it. "I have a grievance against you," I heard a man say to an author. "I was tired when I went to bed last night and I took your book to put me to sleep. I got so interested in it that I read till three." Now this was a mild book of travel, with not one piece of physical excitement in it. BED BOOKS. TjPhen we pass to books calculated to induce sleep, we are on much easier ground. Large numbers o£ books are so recommended; some hostesses, indeed, think it part of their duty to furnish guest bedrooms with this type. Obviously a bed book should not be very exciting. You should not close the book and put out the light wondering who it was that drove the knife into the heart of the dark foreigner in state room 8 of the Purple Train, or disturbed by the struggles of a Hardy or a Galsworthy heroine caught in the toils. The most readable advice I know on the subject is in Mr. Robert Blatchford's charming pocket volume "My Favourite Books." This is the Robert Blatchford who, as editor of 'he famous Socialist organ the "Clarion" must have appeared to many serious English people as a tiger socking blood. He is an admirable critic. Listen to this fiery Socialist (as he was then) on reading in bed:

* "cntlcman, look you, would fain ro t< «\eev like a gentleman. That is leisurely, Hndly v!th a "ratDful .v«illo to Goodman Day, Ills host that is, and a graceful Erecting tc Mistress Xijht. his hostess that is to I.e. Xone but a boor would turn liis hark upon iho sun in churlish haste, and jump into the arms of Morpheus neck" and crop, like, n seal rollln" off an ice-floe. Therefore a gentleman reads before he goes to sleep. The ideal bed book should lie small, printed In Rood type, not too boisterous, not too fail: an old friend. Then, will) a mild clear light, a pipe, and something In a tumbler, a man may court happiness, and win her; and the malice of the sorts and the follies of the fleSli shall fret his soul no more,

Mr. Blatchford went on to say that the best bed book he knew was Spenser's poetry. "Only in the silence of the night can one hear the murmur of its song, like the regular irregularity, the ordered wildness, and the charming cadence of a brook." Next he placed Sir Thomas Browne. Among other poetry, Omar Khayyam, Morris's

"Earthly Paradise," Shakespeare's Sonnets, Browning's Lyrics, Shelley's "Alastor," and Longfellow's "Hiawatha"; in prose, among other things, p:.rts of the Bible, Montaigne Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Andersen's "Fairy Tales." Novels he did not recommend. New novels were, for obvious reasons, "as impossible at the bedside as a cornet solo." He asked for "Singers, talkers, tattlers, prattlers, ar our "pillow." A bed book must be a well-bred companion. "A man does not go to bed to be bullied, roared at, roused to mutiny, deceived into tears, nor yet to be preached to death by wild curates."

You may like to make your own lists. I won't bore you with mine, except to say that it includes O. Henry and "The Experiences of an Irish E.M." At any rate, I like to know they are available. ANYTHING FOR READING. We must all make our own choice. I know a doctor who sometimes takes a mathematical book to bed with him — or he says he does. Perhaps he is like a man Mr. Stephen Leacock knew: Mr. Leacock didn't mind him having a whisky before turning in, but he objected to him calling it Thucydides. Another man I knew, a commercial traveller with a great appetite for books, could not retire without a book. Once at a country hotel—you know what the reading matter is often like there—he was driven to carrying to his room the Post, Office Directory. "Care-charmer sleep," or any comment you like. Possibly he slept as soundly as if he had lulled .himself with the Choric Song from "The Lotus Eaters."