By this behavior you commend to his favor your church, human nature and the cause dearest to your heart.
If you are the visiting worshiper, and it is evident that the other occupants of the pew are the owners thereof, make courteous and grateful acknowledgment at the close of the service, of the hospitality you have received. I hope the return you get will not be the cold supercilious stare one true gentlewoman had from the holder of a pew in the middle aisle of a fashionable church in New York. The guest put into Mrs. Haut Ton’s pew thanked the latter simply and gracefully for the opportunity given her of hearing an admirable sermon.
“Who are you that dare address me!” said the silent stare. “It is bad enough to have my pew invaded by an unvouched-for stranger without being subjected to the impertinence of speech!”
The last place upon God’s earth where incivility and the arrogance of self-conceit are admissible is His house. “Be pitiful,” writes the apostle who learned his code of manners from One who has been not irreverently called “the truest gentleman who ever lived.” “Be pitiful; be courteous!”
THE PASTOR’S FAMILY
THE PASTOR’S CALL
The relations of parishioner and the pastor’s family are often strained hard by the popular misconception of the social obligations existing—or that should exist—between them. In no “call” that I ever heard of is the clergyman enjoined to cater to the whims and vanities of exacting members by visits that are not demanded by spiritual or temporal needs, and which minister to nothing but the aforesaid jealous vanity. Send for a clergyman when his priestly offices are required. For the rest of his precious time let him come as he likes, and go whither he considers his duty calls him. He was a man before he took orders, and the man has social rights. Let him “neighbor,” as old-fashioned folk used to say, with his kind.
The aforesaid “call” makes no mention of his family. If you like to call on them when they come to the parish, and if you find them congenial—your congeners, in fact—keep up the association as you would with your doctor’s, or your lawyer’s family. That you belong to Doctor Barnabas’ parish, that you are the wife or daughter of an officer in his church, gives you absolutely no claim on his wife or daughters beyond what you, individually, possess. To demand that Mrs. Barnabas, refined in every instinct, highly educated and with tastes for what is best and highest in social companionship, should be bullied and patronized by Mrs. Million, a purse-proud vulgarian, unlearned and stupid, is sheer barbarity. Yet we see it—and worse—in many American churches.