(This fourfold collecting-box allowed a pleasurable width of choice, but a quite different consideration had led to its introduction and the supersession of the cloth bag formerly in use. During a period of several years a lump of sugar had been put in the bag every Lord's day at Breaking of Bread, and though clouds of prayer were offered up to soften the heart of the sinner-Saint who played this weekly prank upon his Meeting and his Maker, they were all of no avail. He (or she) hardened his heart; every Lord's day the bag was found to contain yet another impious lump. Stare Brother Brawn never so stark at every giving hand, the sinner remained undetected in his sweet career. It was finally suggested by Aunt Jael that a new type of box, with but a narrow slit for the coins to pass through, would baffle the evil-doer. The choice-of-beneficiare partisans united with her, and they evolved between them this fourfold enormity, with its meat-dish dimensions and its four defensive slits. Vain precautions! Idle hopes! All the sugar-sinner did was to insert a much smaller piece than before; usually in Foreign Field. It was a marvel to the Saints how he squeezed it through; a tragedy how he persevered in his sin.)
After the Offertory came perhaps another hymn and prayer; then the End. We all stood up and sang the following:
When we will be
Where we would be,
When we shall be
What we should be,
Things that are not
Now, nor could be,
Then shall be—ee
Our own!
While we remained standing, Pentecost raised his hands in benediction. And so to dinner.
* * * * * * *
Breaking of Bread, though the principal service, was only one of five each Lord's Day at the Room, all of which I attended regularly before I was seven. There was but an hour at home for dinner ere I set forth for Lord's Day School at half past one, which lasted for an hour and was followed immediately by the Young Persons' Prayer-Meeting. I got home for tea, after which we all sallied forth to the Gospel Address for Unbelievers, usually delivered by Brother Browning, two hours long and dreary beyond belief, in a ghostly atmosphere of guttering candle-light. This was followed by another Prayer-Meeting, followed again, at least in the summer months, by the Street Testimony, when we all repaired to the Strand, and gathered together a mixed circle of friends and curious and scoffers—like the Salvation Army in the next generation. Even this was not the end; for at home there was Reading and prayers, just as on week-days. If I were more deadly-tired than usual after that awful Sunday, Aunt Jael would spin the prayer out and choose a specially long chapter. Most Sundays I went to bed half sick with fatigue, my head aching, hardly able to undress.
Smiling was forbidden, and I had little reason to break the rule. Tears, however, were allowed, and I shed them in plenty.
* * * * * * *
If Breaking of Bread was not our only Meeting, nor was our Room the only Meeting in the town. I knew of four others. First, the Grosvenor Street Branch Meeting, offspring of ours, in the special care of Brother Quappleworthy, who preached there on Sunday evenings. Salvation always derided my Grandmother and Aunt for calling it Grow-vner Street. "I'm no scholard," she said, "but tidden common-sense to mispernounce like that. Gross-veener 'tis, and Gross-veener ollers 'twill be!"
Second, there was the Close, Exclusive or Darbyite Meeting, ruled over by one Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, a giant-tall man with a flat white face, who reminded me of a walking tombstone. The Exclusives or Darbyites regarded us, I suppose, much as we regarded the rest of Christendom; as walkers in darkness. We regarded them as wandering sheep, foolish perhaps, rather than sinful. "Those brethren," Mr. Pentecost described them, "whose consciences lead them to refuse my fellowship and to deprive me of theirs." I never went to their Tawborough Meeting while I was a child.