The Lighter Side of English Life

by Frank Frankfort Moore

He was lucky in catching the train and the subsequent connections, and arrived at the church with nearly half an hour to spare. He went through the service and found himself in the pulpit with his sermon opened on the cushion in front of him.

Now it so happened that the discourse which he had drawn in his usual way from the paternal sack was the valedictory sermon preached by his father in the church of which he had been rector for forty years, and there was the son beginning it in a church which he had never seen before that morning!

He was quite unconscious of any want of felicity in his choice. He began the sermon and went through with it, feeling no qualm. He had every confidence in the orthodoxy of his father; he would never get into a scrape through preaching what the dear old man had preached years ago. And so he went onto tell his congregation that more than forty years had passed since he had first stood before them to preach the Gospel of Truth, and that every year of that forty he had stood where he was standing to-day, Sunday after Sunday—that he saw before him aged men and women whom he had known as young men and maidens—that by the favour of Heaven he had lived to baptize the offspring of those whom he had himself baptized in their infancy—yea, unto the third generation he had come, and now he was standing before them for the last time. The hour of parting had come, and would any among them say that that hour was not bitter to them all?

Well, no one did go so far as to assert that the hour was not bitter to them all. I was assured that the congregation were bathed in tears, so affected were they by the thought that the clergyman who had “obliged” for the day was about to vacate the pulpit for ever. They felt the blow deeply—much more deeply than the parson seemed to feel it, for he managed to hold back his tears so long as he was in the pulpit, though his marvellous powers of self-repression may have deserted him an hour later, and he may have broken down utterly in the train when making the return journey; the chances are, however, that he did nothing of the sort, for he had not the remotest idea what the sermon had been about.

And the strangest thing of all in connection with this incident is that the churchwardens expressed themselves as greatly pleased with the sermon, and one of them referring to it the next day in the hearing of my informant, said he had never been so affected in his life as he was under the influence of the sermon, and he hoped that the eloquent clergyman would be able to preach it again in the near future.

It is quite likely that his wish was gratified, though I do not think that any one who had the best interests of the Church at heart would advocate the adoption of the farewell tours system of the popular actor or singer by the clergy. It might hurt the susceptibilities of some members of a congregation to hear a clergyman bid an affecting farewell to a crowd of people who were complete strangers to him, and the sincerity of his sorrow might be called in question when they reflected that an ordinary man can scarcely be broken-hearted at the thought of never seeing again the faces he had never seen before. But that, of course, involves the question of how far the susceptibilities of the weaker brethren should be considered.

My informant, who was present upon the occasion referred to, was also a stranger to the place. He was staying with the doctor's family, and, walking home from the church, the doctor's wife remarked how beautiful the sermon had been.

“Your rector bears his age very well,” said her companion. “He does not look a day over forty, and yet, according to his own account, he must be at least sixty-five.”

“Our rector? But that clergyman is not our rector,” said the lady. “Our rector is ill; the one we had today came to do duty for him. He is a stranger.”

“But why, then, should he talk of having baptized half the congregation and married the other half—of never having been absent from the pulpit for forty years and more?” asked the man.