Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.Anonymous
History
Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.
Anonymous
Clergy; Medicine -- Anecdotes; Medicine -- Humor; Pastoral theology -- Anecdotes; Physicians
Sir Godfrey Kneller and Dr. Radcliffe lived next door to each other in
Bow Street, just after the latter had come up to town, and were
extremely intimate. Kneller had a very fine garden, and as the doctor
was fond of flowers, he permitted him to have a door into it.
Radcliffe's servants, however, gathering and destroying the flowers,
Kneller sent to inform him that he would nail up the door; to which
Radcliffe, in his rough manner, replied, "Tell him he may do anything
but paint it."--"Well," retorted Kneller, "he may say what he will; for
tell him, I will take anything from him, except physic."
SLAPS FOR SLEEPERS IN CHURCH.
A Methodist preacher once, observing that several of his congregation
had fallen asleep, exclaimed with a loud voice, "A fire! a fire!"
"Where? where?" cried his auditors, whom the alarm had thoroughly
aroused from their slumbers. "In the place of judgment," said the
preacher, "for those who sleep under the ministry of the holy gospel."
Another preacher, of a different persuasion, more remarkable for drowsy
hearers, finding himself in a like unpleasant situation with his
auditory, or rather _dormitory_, suddenly stopped in his discourse,
and, addressing himself in a whispering tone to a number of noisy
children in the gallery, said, "Silence! silence! children; if you keep
up such a noise, you will waken all the old folks below." Dr. South,
chaplain of Charles II., once when preaching before the Court--then
composed, as every one knows, of the most profligate and dissolute men
in the nation--saw, in the middle of his discourse, that sleep had
gradually made a conquest of his hearers. He immediately stopped short,
and, changing his tone, called out to Lord Lauderdale three times. His
Lordship standing up, Dr. South said, with great composure, "My Lord, I
am sorry to interrupt your repose; but I must beg of you that you will
not snore quite so loud, lest you awaken his Majesty."
Lassenius, chaplain to the Danish Court in the end of the seventeenth
century, for a long time, to his vexation, had seen that during his
sermon the greater part of the congregation fell asleep. One day he
suddenly stopped, and, pulling shuttlecock and battledore from his
pocket, began to play with them in the pulpit. This odd behaviour
naturally attracted the attention of the hearers who were still awake;
they jogged the sleepers, and in a very short time everybody was
lively, and looking to the pulpit with the greatest astonishment. Then
Lassenius began a very severe castigatory discourse, saying, "When I
announce to you sacred and important truths, you are not ashamed to go
to sleep; but when I play the fool, you are all eye and ear."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches. — John Shaqi
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