“Well, sir,” said the Colonel, “since you ask me what struck me most forcibly during my tour of England, and supposing that you want a civil answer to a civil question, I will say that the thing that astonished me more than anything else was the lack of religious enterprise in England.
“THE LACK OF RELIGIOUS ENTERPRISE IN ENGLAND.”
“I have visited nearly every section of your country, and what did I find? Why, sir, in every town there was a parish church of the regulation pattern and one other kind of church, which was generally some sort of Methodist in its persuasion. Now, in America there is hardly a village which hasn’t half a dozen different kinds of churches, and as a rule at least one of them belongs to some brand-new denomination, one that has just been patented and put on the market, as you might say. When I lived in Middleopolis, Iowa, there were only fifteen hundred people in the place, but we had six kinds of churches. There was the Episcopalian, the Methodist, the Congregational, the Baptist, the Presbyterian, the Unitarian, and the Unleavened Disciples church, not to mention the colored Methodist church, which, of course, we didn’t count among respectable white denominations. All these churches were lively and aggressive, and the Unleavened Disciples, that had just been brought out, was as vigorous as the oldest of them. All of them were furnishing good preaching and good music, and striving to outdo one another in spreading the Gospel and raising the price of pew-rents. I could go for two or three months to the Presbyterian church, and then I could take a hack at the Baptists and pass half a dozen Sundays with the Methodists, and all this variety would not cost me more than it would have cost to pay pew-rent all the year round in any one church. And then, besides the preaching, there were the entertainments that each church had to get up if it didn’t want to fall behind its rivals. We had courses of lectures, and returned missionaries, and ice-cream festivals till you couldn’t rest. Why, although I am an old theatrical manager, I should not like to undertake to run a first-class American church in opposition to one run by some young preacher who had been trained to the business and knew just what the popular religious taste demanded. I never was mixed up in church business but once, and then I found that I wasn’t in my proper sphere.”
The Colonel chuckled slowly to himself, as his custom was when anything amused him, and I asked him to tell me his ecclesiastical experience.
“Well, this was the way of it,” he replied. “One winter the leading citizens of the place decided to get up a series of union meetings. Perhaps you don’t know what a union meeting is? I thought so. It bears out what I was saying about your want of religious enterprise. Well, it’s a sort of monster combination, as we would say in the profession. All the churches agree to hold meetings together, and all the preaching talent of the whole of them is collected in one pulpit, and each man preaches in turn. Of course every minister has his own backers, who are anxious to see him do himself and his denomination credit, and who turn out in full force so as to give him their support. The result is that a union meeting will always draw, even in a town where no single church can get a full house, no matter what attractions it may offer.
“Now, a fundamental rule of a union meeting is that no doctrines are to be preached to which any one could object. The Baptist preacher is forbidden to say anything about baptism, and the Methodist can’t allude to falling from grace in a union meeting. This is supposed to keep things peaceful and to avoid arguments and throwing of hymn-books and such-like proceedings, which would otherwise be inevitable.
“The union meetings had been in progress for three or four nights when I looked into the Presbyterian church, where they were held one evening, just to see how the thing was drawing. All the ministers in town, except the Episcopalian minister, were sitting on the platform waiting their cues. The Episcopalian minister had been asked to join in the services, but he had declined, saying that if it was all the same to his dissenting and partially Christian friends he would prefer to play a lone hand; and the colored minister was serving out his time in connection with some of his neighbors’ chickens that, he said, had flown into his kitchen and committed suicide there, so he couldn’t have been asked, even if the white ministers had been willing to unite with him.
“The Presbyterian minister was finishing his sermon when I entered, and soon as he had retired the Baptist minister got up and gave out a hymn which was simply crowded with Baptist doctrine. I had often heard it, and I remember that first verse, which ran this way:
“‘I’d rather be a Baptist
And wear a smiling face,
Than for to be a Methodist
And always fall from grace.’
“The hymn was no sooner given out than the Methodist minister rose and claimed a foul, on the ground that Baptist doctrine had been introduced into a union meeting. There was no manner of doubt that he was right, but the Baptists in the congregation sang the hymn with such enthusiasm that they drowned the minister’s voice. But when the hymn was over there was just a heavenly row. One Presbyterian deacon actually went so far as to draw on a Baptist elder, and there would have been blood shed if the elder had not knocked him down with a kerosene lamp, and convinced him that drawing pistols in church was not the spirit of the Gospel. Everybody was talking at once, and the women who were not scolding were crying. The meeting was beginning to look like an enthusiastic political meeting in Cork, when I rapped on the pulpit and called for order. Everybody knew me and wanted to hear what I had to say, so the meeting calmed down, except near the door, where the Methodists had got a large Baptist jammed into the wood-box, and in the vestibule, where the Unitarians had formed a ring to see the Unitarian minister argue with an Unleavened Disciple.
“I told the people that they were making a big mistake in trying to run that sort of an entertainment without an umpire. The idea pleased them, and before I knew what was going to be done they had passed a resolution making me umpire and calling on me to decide whether the Baptist hymn constituted a foul. I decided that it did not, on the ground that, according to the original agreement, no minister was to preach any sectarian doctrines, but that nothing was said about the hymns that might be sung. Then I proposed that in order to prevent any future disputes and to promote brotherly feeling, a new system of singing hymns should be adopted. I said, as far as I can recollect, that singing hymns did not come under the head of incidental music, but was a sort of entr’acte music, intended to relax and divert the audience while bracing up to hear the next sermon. This being the case, it stood to reason that hymn-singing should be made a real pleasure, and not an occasion for hard feeling and the general heaving of books and foot-stools. ‘Now,’ said I, ‘that can be managed in this way. When you sing let everybody sing the same tune, but each denomination sing whatever words it prefers to sing. Everybody will sing his own doctrines, but nobody will have any call to feel offended.’
“The idea was received with general enthusiasm, especially among the young persons present, and the objections made by a few hard-headed old conservatives were overruled. The next time singing was in order the Unitarian minister selected a familiar short-metre tune, and each minister told his private flock what hymn to sing to it. Everybody sang at the top of his or her lungs, and as nobody ever understands the words that anybody else is singing, there did not seem to be anything strange in the singing of six different hymns to the same tune. There was a moment when things were a little strained in consequence of the Presbyterians, who were a strong body, and had got their second wind, singing a verse about predestination with such vigor as partly to swamp their rivals, but I decided that there was no foul, and the audience, being rather tired with their exertions, settled down to listen to the next sermon.
“The next time it was the Methodist minister who gave out the tune, and he selected one that nobody who was not born and bred a Methodist had ever heard of. We used to sing something very much like it at the windlass when I was a sailor, and it had a regular hurricane chorus. When the Methodist contingent started in to sing their hymn to this tune, not a note could any of the rival denominations raise. They stood it in silence until two verses had been sung, and then——
“Well, I won’t undertake to describe what followed. After about five minutes the Methodists didn’t feel like singing any more. In fact, most of them were outside the meeting-house limping their way home, and remarking that they had had enough of ‘thish yer fellowship with other churches’ to last them for the rest of their lives. Inside the meeting-house the triumphant majority were passing resolutions calling me a depraved worldling, who, at the instigation of the devil, had tried to convert a religious assemblage into an Orange riot. Even the Unitarians, who always maintained that they did not believe in the devil, voted for the resolutions, and three of them were appointed on the committee charged with putting me out. I didn’t stay to hear any more sermons, but I afterward understood that all the ministers preached at me, and that the amount of union displayed in putting the blame of everything on my shoulders was so touching that men who had been enemies for years shook hands and called one another brothers.
“Yes! we are an enterprising people in ecclesiastical matters, and I calculate that it will be a long time before an English village will see a first-class union meeting.”
