CLERICAL ERRORS.
For the Table Book.
The Rev. Mr. Alcock, of Burnsal, near Skipton, Yorkshire.
Every inhabitant of Craven has heard tales of this eccentric person, and numberless are the anecdotes told of him. I have not the history of Craven, and cannot name the period of his death exactly, but I believe it happened between fifty and sixty years ago. He was a learned man and a wit—so much addicted to waggery, that he sometimes forgot his office, and indulged in sallies rather unbecoming a minister, but nevertheless he was a sincere Christian. The following anecdotes are well known in Craven, and may amuse elsewhere. One of Mr. Alcock’s friends, at whose house he was in the habit of calling previously to his entering the church on Sundays, once took occasion to unstitch his sermon and misplace the leaves. At the church, Mr. Alcock, when he had read a page, discovered the joke. “Peter,” said he, “thou rascal! what’s thou been doing with my sermon?” then turning to his congregation he said, “Brethren, Peter’s been misplacing the leaves of my sermon, I have not time to put them right, I shall read on as I find it, and you must make the best of it that you can;” and he accordingly read through the confused mass, to the astonishment of his flock. On another occasion, when in the pulpit, he found that he had forgotten his sermon; nowise disappointed at the loss, he called out to his clerk, “Jonas, I have left my sermon at home, so hand us up that Bible, and I’ll read ’em a chapter in Job worth ten of it!” Jonas, like his master, was an oddity, and used to make a practice of falling asleep at the commencement of the sermon, and waking in the middle of it, and bawling out “amen,” thereby destroyed the gravity of the congregation. Mr. Alcock once lectured him for this, and particularly requested he would not say amen till he had finished his discourse. Jonas promised compliance, but on the following Sunday made bad worse, for he fell asleep as usual, and in the middle of the sermon awoke and bawled out “Amen at a venture!” The Rev. Mr. Alcock is, I think, buried before the communion-table of Skipton church, under a slab of blue marble, with a Latin inscription to his memory.
T. Q. M.