A few Sabbaths since I chanced into a church where a hundred and fifty children were assembled for the afternoon service, to be addressed as Sunday-school scholars. The out-door air was a luxury to breathe--it was one of those lovely spring days, which woo every living thing to bask in the warm sunshine. These children, many of them under four, none over fifteen, perspiring in their out-door clothing, were closely packed in those high-backed, uncomfortable seats--their cheeks at fever heat, and every pore in their crucified bodies crying out for ventilation and common sense--neither of which they had for a mortal hour-and-a-half, to speak within bounds. In vain did teachers frown, and nudge, and poke--in vain did the well-meaning but stupidest of possible ministers pound the pulpit cushions, to impress upon their memories, by gesticulation, his long-winded sentences; they were all written--as they deserved to be--in water. Flesh and blood couldn't stand it--_least of all that most unperverted, critical, and discerning of audiences--childhood_!
That preacher, in my opinion (and I ached to tell him so), did more harm in that hour and a half than he can remedy in a life-time. This may seem a bold assertion. _I_ think not. One hundred and fifty little children to carry away with them from that church (not only for that afternoon, but for a long life of Sundays), a disgust of that blessed day, and what _should_ be its sweet and holy services. But what is the use of talking? Every great and good cause is sure to be knocked in the head by some blunderbuss. Why didn't that man tell those children some _short_, simple story that the youngest child there could understand, appreciate, and be interested in? Why didn't he open wide the church-doors before their attention and interest flagged? Why so enamored of the sound of his own voice, as to keep those steaming, par-boiled little victims in that sacerdotal vapor-bath, after he had said all he could think of to them, to address their teachers, who, if necessary, should have had a meeting by themselves for that infliction? And why--(I ask all of you who have not forgotten how _your_ restless limbs ached when _you_ were children)--must _another_ minister get up after that, and torture common-sense, and his fainting, frying auditors, by another aimless, inflated, meaningless, and last-drop-in-the-bucket, but (thanks to a kind Providence), _final_ address? And why didn't somebody seize the sexton of that church, who had compelled a hundred and fifty children to breathe the foul air which the morning worshipers had bequeathed, and which he was too lazy to let out the windows--why didn't somebody, I say, seize that sexton, and place him in an exhausted receiver, long enough to give him some _faint_ notion of what he made those par-boiled children suffer in that "protracted meeting?"