The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford | Page 7

musicians sat, the musicians being performers on the
clarionet, flute, violin, and violoncello. Right in front was a long

enclosure, called the communion pew, which was usually occupied by
a number of the poorer members of the congregation.
There were three services every Sunday, besides intermitting prayer-
meetings, but these I did not as yet attend. Each service consisted of a
hymn, reading the Bible, another hymn, a prayer, the sermon, a third
hymn, and a short final prayer. The reading of the Bible was
unaccompanied with any observations or explanations, and I do not
remember that I ever once heard a mistranslation corrected.
The first, or long prayer, as it was called, was a horrible hypocrisy, and
it was a sore tax on the preacher to get through it. Anything more
totally unlike the model recommended to us in the New Testament
cannot well be imagined. It generally began with a confession that we
were all sinners, but no individual sins were ever confessed, and then
ensued a kind of dialogue with God, very much resembling the
speeches which in later years I have heard in the House of Commons
from the movers and seconders of addresses to the Crown at the
opening of Parliament.
In all the religion of that day nothing was falser than the long prayer.
Direct appeal to God can only be justified when it is passionate. To
come maundering into His presence when we have nothing particular to
say is an insult, upon which we should never presume if we had a
petition to offer to any earthly personage. We should not venture to
take up His time with commonplaces or platitudes; but our minister
seemed to consider that the Almighty, who had the universe to govern,
had more leisure at His command that the idlest lounger at a club.
Nobody ever listened to this performance. I was a good child on the
whole, but I am sure I did not; and if the chapel were now in existence,
there might be traced on the flap of the pew in which we sat many
curious designs due to these dreary performances.
The sermon was not much better. It generally consisted of a text, which
was a mere peg for a discourse, that was pretty much the same from
January to December. The minister invariably began with the fall of
man; propounded the scheme of redemption, and ended by depicting in
the morning the blessedness of the saints, and in the evening the doom
of the lost. There was a tradition that in the morning there should be
"experience"--that is to say, comfort for the elect, and that the evening
should be appropriated to their less fortunate brethren.

The evening service was the most trying to me of all these. I never
could keep awake, and knew that to sleep under the Gospel was a sin.
The chapel was lighted in winter by immense chandeliers with tiers of
candles all round. These required perpetual snuffing, and I can see the
old man going round the chandeliers in the middle of the service with a
mighty pair of snuffers which opened and shut with a loud click. How I
envied him because he had semi-secular occupation which prevented
that terrible drowsiness! How I envied the pew-opener, who was
allowed to stand at the vestry door, and could slip into the vestry every
now and then, or even into the burial-ground if he heard irreverent boys
playing there! The atmosphere of the chapel on hot nights was most
foul, and this added to my discomfort. Oftentimes in winter, when no
doors or windows were open, I have seen the glass panes streaming
with wet inside, and women carried out fainting.
On rare occasions I was allowed to go with my father when he went
into the villages to preach. As a deacon he was also a lay-preacher, and
I had the ride in the gig out and home, and tea at a farm-house.
Perhaps I shall not have a better opportunity to say that, with all these
drawbacks, my religious education did confer upon me some positive
advantages. The first was a rigid regard for truthfulness. My parents
never would endure a lie or the least equivocation. The second was
purity of life, and I look upon this as a simply incalculable gain.
Impurity was not an excusable weakness in the society in which I lived;
it was a sin for which dreadful punishment was reserved. The reason
for my virtue may have been a wrong reason, but, anyhow, I was saved,
and being saved, much more was saved than health and peace of mind.
To this day I do not know where to find a weapon strong enough to
subdue the tendency to impurity in young men; and