Country-preachers
are always so dull!"
Arthur was silent till we were out of hearing. Then he said to himself,
almost inaudibly, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them."
"Yes," I assented: "no doubt that is the principle on which church-going
rests."
"And when he does go," he continued (our thoughts ran so much together,
that our conversation was often slightly elliptical), "I suppose he
repeats the words 'I believe in the Communion of Saints'?"
But by this time we had reached the little church, into which a goodly
stream of worshipers, consisting mainly of fishermen and their
families, was flowing.
The service would have been pronounced by any modern aesthetic
religionist--or religious aesthete, which is it?--to be crude and cold:
to me, coming fresh from the ever-advancing developments of a London
church under a soi-disant 'Catholic' Rector, it was unspeakably
refreshing.
There was no theatrical procession of demure little choristers, trying
their best not to simper under the admiring gaze of the congregation:
the people's share in the service was taken by the people themselves,
unaided, except that a few good voices, judiciously posted here and
there among them, kept the singing from going too far astray.
There was no murdering of the noble music, contained in the Bible and
the Liturgy, by its recital in a dead monotone, with no more expression
than a mechanical talking-doll.
Pages:
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171