A YANKEE’S DESCRIPTION OF A RITUALIST SERVICE.

Western Star, Issue 787, 27 October 1883, Page 5 (Supplement)

A YANKEE’S DESCRIPTION OF A RITUALIST SERVICE.

“ What did I see ? Wall, I saw men and women playing at skittles in the nineteenth century, as they had done six centuries ago, and I thought that the Almighty must have put their brains in their shoes. Two lines of young men came in who were dressed in petticoats, that were neither up to their knees nor down to their heels, but between the two, and they walked in so straight a file that, like wild duck flying, one shot might have done for them all. Then a clergyman went and preached a sermon, and to my mind the best passage in it was that between the pulpit and the door.” “ You have no reverence,” said his friend.

“ Perhaps not. But this I will say, that if 1 met a Hottentot who had two sincere beliefs about a duck, I would respect those beliefs. Reverence 1 Hot, perhaps, in your way, for I never saw a cathedral in Europe for whose furniture, however grand, 1 felt the slightest reverence ; but when I have been on the Atlantic in a gale of wind, with the spray hissing through the rigging, then 1 have had, air, a sense of the Almighty that did fill me with reverence. -Nay, I will tell you more. I was a man who never thought much of God till my first little child was born, and when I stood beside his cradle 1 said to myself, ‘That little breathing thing is an immortal being, and he is your child to bring up for the life immortal,’ and I knelt down and prayed there and then to God, and 1 have prayed to him ever since. That is the shape my revereuce takes 1”