The only comfort he could offer to this stricken household was that HE knew how bad they felt, having had a brother who had died with equal suddenness and also without hope, as he "had suosode hisself with a gun."
This lengthy sermon was followed by a hymn, sung a line at a time at the preacher's dictation:
"The body we now to the grave will commit,
To there see corruption till Jesus sees fit
A spirit'al body for it to prepare,
Which henceforth then shall immortality wear."
The New Mennonites being forbidden by the "Rules of the Meeting" ever to hear a prayer or sermon by one who is not "a member," it was necessary, at the end of the Reverend Abram Underwocht's sermon, for all the Mennonites present to retire to a room apart and sit behind closed doors, while the Evangelical brother put forth his false doctrine.
So religiously stirred was Tillie by the occasion that she was strongly tempted to rise and follow into the kitchen those who were thus retiring from the sound of the false teacher's voice. But her conversion not yet being complete, she kept her place.
No doubt it was not so much the character of Brother Underwocht's New Mennonite sermon which effected this state in Tillie as that the spiritual condition of the young girl, just awakening to her womanhood, with all its mysterious craving, its religious brooding, its emotional susceptibility, led her to respond with her whole soul to the first appeal to her feelings.
Absorbed in her mournful contemplation of her own deep "conviction of sin," she did not heed the singing, led by the Evangelical brother, of the hymn,
"Rock of Ages, clept for me,"
nor did she hear a word of his discourse.
At the conclusion of the house services, and before the journey to the graveyard, the supper was served, first to the mourners, and then to all those who expected to follow the body to the grave. The third table, for those who had prepared the meal, and the fourth, for the hostlers, were set after the departure of the funeral procession.