SLAPS FOR SLEEPERS IN CHURCH.
A Methodist preacher once, observing that several of his congregation had fallen asleep, exclaimed with a loud voice, "A fire! a fire!" "Where? where?" cried his auditors, whom the alarm had thoroughly aroused from their slumbers. "In the place of judgment," said the preacher, "for those who sleep under the ministry of the holy gospel." Another preacher, of a different persuasion, more remarkable for drowsy hearers, finding himself in a like unpleasant situation with his auditory, or rather dormitory, suddenly stopped in his discourse, and, addressing himself in a whispering tone to a number of noisy children in the gallery, said, "Silence! silence! children; if you keep up such a noise, you will waken all the old folks below." Dr. South, chaplain of Charles II., once when preaching before the Court—then composed, as every one knows, of the most profligate and dissolute men in the nation—saw, in the middle of his discourse, that sleep had gradually made a conquest of his hearers. He immediately stopped short, and, changing his tone, called out to Lord Lauderdale three times. His Lordship standing up, Dr. South said, with great composure, "My Lord, I am sorry to interrupt your repose; but I must beg of you that you will not snore quite so loud, lest you awaken his Majesty."
Lassenius, chaplain to the Danish Court in the end of the seventeenth century, for a long time, to his vexation, had seen that during his sermon the greater part of the congregation fell asleep. One day he suddenly stopped, and, pulling shuttlecock and battledore from his pocket, began to play with them in the pulpit. This odd behaviour naturally attracted the attention of the hearers who were still awake; they jogged the sleepers, and in a very short time everybody was lively, and looking to the pulpit with the greatest astonishment. Then Lassenius began a very severe castigatory discourse, saying, "When I announce to you sacred and important truths, you are not ashamed to go to sleep; but when I play the fool, you are all eye and ear."
When Fenelon, as almoner, attended Louis XIV. to a sermon preached by a Capuchin, he fell asleep. The Capuchin perceived it, and breaking off his discourse, cried out, "Awake that sleeping Abbé, who comes here only to pay his court to the King;" a reproof which Fenelon himself often related with pleasure after he became Archbishop of Cambray.