Laicus; Or, the Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish.Abbott, Lyman
Religion
Laicus; Or, the Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish.
Abbott, Lyman
Christian fiction; New York (State) -- Fiction; Parishes -- Fiction
Consider, too, its effect on the individual. I attended a morning
prayer meeting last winter in the city. A young man told his
experience. He started in the morning, he said, to go to the store.
But it seemed as though the Lord bid him retrace his steps. A voice
within seemed to say to him, "Your duty is at the prayer meeting."
The battle between Christ and the world was long and bitter. Christ
at length prevailed. He had come to the prayer meeting. He wanted to
tell the brethren what Christ had done for his soul. The experience
may have been genuine. It may have been his duty to leave the store
for the church that particular morning. But what is the effect of a
training which teaches a young man to consider all the time he gives
to the store as time appropriated to the world? It is that he can
serve both God and mammon; that he actually does. It draws a sharp
line between the sacred and secular. And most of his life is
necessarily the secular.
I forgot to mention that Mrs. Goodsole had come over with her
husband. She and Jennie sat side by side. But she had not opened her
mouth since the salutations of the evening had been interchanged.
She is the meekest and mildest of women. She is also the most timed.
In public she rarely speaks. But it is currently reported that she
avenges herself for her silence by the curtain lectures, she
delivers to her good husband at home. Of that, however, I cannot be
sure. I speak only of rumor. Now she took advantage of a pause to
say:
Mrs. Goodsole.:
--I like Mr. Laicus's doctrine. It's very comforting to a woman like
me who am so busy at home that I can hardly get out to church on
Sundays.
Deacon Goodsole.:
--I don't believe it's true. Yes I do too. But I don't believe it's
applicable. That is--well what I mean to say--I can't express myself
exactly, but my idea is this, that the people that won't work in the
church are the very ones that do nothing out of it. The busy ones
are busy everywhere. There is Mr. Line, for example. He has a large
farm. He keeps a summer hotel, two houses always full; and they are
capitally kept houses. That, of itself, is enough to keep any man
busy. The whole burden of both hotel and farm rests on his
shoulders. And yet he is elder and member of the board of trustees,
and on hand, in every kind of exigency, in the church. He is one of
the public school commissioners, is active in getting new roads laid
out, and public improvements introduced, is the real founder of our
new academy, and, in short, has a hand in every good work that is
ever undertaken in Wheathedge. And there is Dr. Curall, whose case
Mr. Laicus has advocated so eloquently and who is too busy to be an
elder; and I verily believe I could count all his patients on the
fingers of my two hands.
Mrs. Goodsole,: [(inclined to agree with everybody, and so to live
at peace and amity with all mankind).]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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