The next day was Sunday and Sundays were quite different from all the other days. In the morning the girls always marched two by two to church a long mile away, where they sat in the front pews with their eyes fixed upon the clergyman. This often proved a trying ordeal for that gentleman because this particular church had no regular rector. Instead, each Sunday, a student from the Theological Seminary just north of the village offered up home made prayers and stammered forth his first sermon before the long suffering members of that little church. Each successive student, it seemed, was more bashful than the last; and if any one of those blushing young preachers had ever learned to deliver a sermon, he promptly forgot all he knew, when, for the first time, he faced a congregation. There was one thing, however, that all these stuttering young men could do and that was to perspire copiously and continuously. No matter how many impressive gestures the preacher might have practised at home beforehand, he used only one while he occupied that pulpit. With handkerchief clutched firmly in his shaking right hand, he mopped and mopped and mopped his dripping brow.
While the girls couldn’t help being amused, they were always sorry for the tortured youths.
“You wouldn’t think,” said Cora, after one of these painful ordeals, “that they’d be afraid to face thirty or forty girls but they always are. Just as soon as their eyes light on those ten pews full of Highland Hall girls, their carefully prepared words take flight, and I guess they’d like to, too.”
“They seem to find it almost as hard to pass the plate,” laughed Henrietta. “When they get to us their knees begin to wobble.”
“It’s because we stare at those poor creatures so unmercifully,” said Jean. “Even a real minister would be embarrassed, I should think.”
“I’m sorry for them, too,” said Bettie, “but they are funny. Of course they have to learn to preach if they’re going to be ministers, but it seems cruel to make them do it that way.”
“Just like dumping puppies into cold water to teach them to swim,” said Marjory.
“It isn’t very much like our kind of church,” complained Bettie. “It’s too entertaining. We’re Episcopalians and our ministers don’t have to learn how to make their own prayers—the folks that make them know how.”
“Yes,” said Jean, “we’re all getting lonesome for our own kind of services. That’s one thing we miss.”
“Well, then,” said Sallie Dickinson, “I have some good news for you. In about four weeks more the new Episcopal Church will be ready for use and you can go there. Miss Woodruff and Mrs. Henry Rhodes are Episcopalians, so perhaps we’ll all go. We used to go to the old church before it was torn down.”