Prayer-Meeting Killers

Here is a class of barbarians who roam the land, making fearful havoc. Thy swing no tomahawk. They sound no war-whoop. But their track is marked by devastation. I mean that class of persons who go from church to church, charged with the mission of talking religious meetings to death. They are a restless tribe, generally disaffected with their own church, for the reason that the church can no longer endure them; and then they go about, like the roaring lion, seeking whom they may devour.

Though never having seen them before, I can tell them as soon as they enter a meeting. They have a brassy face, a sanctimonious way

of rolling up their eye, a solemn snuffle, and a pompous way of sitting down, as much as to say, “Here goes into the seat an awful amount of religion!” They take off their overcoats, pull out the cuffs of their shirt-sleeves, give an impressive clearing of the throat, and wait for the time to seize their prey.

The meeting is all aglow. Some old Christian has related a melting experience, or a young man has asked for prayers, or a captive of evil habits has recounted his struggles and cried from the depth of an agonized heart, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” Ortonville has just started heavenward, taking all the meeting along with it. The exercises have come to a climax, and the minister is about to pronounce the benediction, or invite the serious into an adjoining room for religious conversation, when the Prayer - meeting Killer begins slowly to rise, his boots creaking, the seat in front groaning under the pressure of his right hand, and everything else seeming to give way. He confesses himself a stranger, but he loves prayer -meetings. He is astonished that there are not more present. He does not see how Christians can be so inconsistent. He has heard an incident diat he feels called upon to relate. He related it that noon at the Fulton Street Prayer-meeting. He related it that aftemoon at an old people’s meeting. He will relate it now in rehearsal for a meeting to-morrow, at which he expects to relate it. His voice is wooden. His eyes are dry as the bottom of a kettle that has been on a stove two hours without any water in it. The young people laugh, and go out one by one. The aged wipe the sweat ’ from their foreheads. And the minister bemns within himself to recite an extemporized litany, “From fire, and plague, and tempest, and itinerant bores, deliver us!”

The interloper would hardly have lived through the night if he could not have given vent to this utterance. It was impossible for him to sit still. There was somewhere down in his clothes a spring which lifted him up inevitably. At the close of the meeting he waited to be congratulated on his happy remarks, and went home feeling that he had given the world a mighty push toward the millennium.

If such an one is notoriously inconsistent, he will talk chiefly on personal holiness. Perhaps failed rich, so that, unencumbered, he might give all his time to prayer-meetings. We knew a horse-jockey whose perpetual theme at such meetings was sanctification; and he said he was speeding toward heaven, but on which of his old nags we had not time to ask him.

One of the chiefs of this barbarian tribe of Prayer-meeting Killers is the expository man. He is very apt to rise with a New Testament in his hand, or there has been some passage that during the day has pressed heavily on his mind. It is probably the first chapter of Romans, or some figurative passage from the Old Testament. He says, for instance: “My brethren, I call your attention to Hosea, 7th and 8th. ‘Ephraim is a cake not turned.’ You all know the history of Ephraim. Ephraim was — ah — well! He was a man mentioned in the Bible. You all know who he was. Surely no intelligent audience like this need to be told who Ephraim was. Now the passage says that he was a cake not turned. There are a good many kinds of cake, my brethren! There is the Indian cake, and the flannel cake, and the buckwheat cake. Now Ephraim was a cake not turned. It is an awful thing not to be turned. My friends, let us all turn!”

It sometimes happens that this religious pest confines himself to the meetings of his own church. Interesting talkers are sometimes detained at home by sickness; but his health is always good. Others dare not venture out in the storm; but all the elements combined could not keep him from his place. He has the same prayer now that he has used for the last twenty years. There is in it an allusion to the death of a prominent individual. You do not understand who he means. The fact is, he composed that prayer about the time that General Jackson died, and he has never been able to drop the allusion. He has a patronizing way of talking to sinners, as much as to say: “Ho! you poor, miserable scalawags, just look at me, and see what you might have been!”

Oh! I wish some enterprising showman would gather all these Prayer-meeting Killers from all our churches into a religious menagerie, and let them all talk together. It would bring together more spectators than the Cardiff Giant. We will take five season tickets for the exhibition. Let ‘these offenders be put by themselves, where, day in and day out, night in and night oyt, they may talk without interruption. Nothing short of an eternity of gab would satisfy them. What will they do in heaven, with nobody to exhort? We imagine them now rising up in the angelic assemblage, proposing to make a few rejnarks. If they get there, you will never again hear of silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.

Alas! the land is strewn with the carcasses of prayer -meetings slain by these religious desperadoes. They have driven the young people from most of our devotional meetings. How to get rid of this affliction is the question with hundreds of churches. We advise your waiting on such persons, and telling them that, owing to the depraved state of public taste, their efforts are not appreciated. If they still persist, tell them they must positively stop or

there will be trouble. If under all this they 18* o are incorrigible, collar them, and hand them over to the police as disturbers of religious assemblages. As you love the Church of God, put an end to their ravages. It is high time that the nuisance was abated. Among the Bornesian cannibals and Fejee Islanders I class this tribe of Prayer-Meeting Killers.