Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1885-05-01

short extract from the Boston Sunday
Herald, printed on our first page TO- day, an.
swers in short order and plain English the
question, why don't people go to church ?"
which it is just now the fashion TO discuss so
much in both secular and religious journals
and in both lay and clerical circles. The real
reason why men and women don't go to
church is that they take no sort of interest
in what they hear there" In other words
they don't go to church because they don't
want to go. The moment man begins to
say that be doesn't go to church because be
is tired out with the weeks work and needs
Sunday for rest, because he can get more
good by staying at home, or because the
preacher is dull, or doesn't preach on ''time
ly" topics that interest men of the world.
the bottom fact is always the same-that man
doesn't go to church because he has allowed
himself to become so choked with material
things and so dead 10 all the higher emotions
that his soul gives no response to the words
which he hears from the pulpit.
1t is true there are dry, prosy, uninterest-
ing preachers, plenty of them but the dull,
dead, uninterested listeners are ten times
plentier in proportion, and it is truth as old
as religion itself that people get at church
and take home with them just what they car
ry with them there. If they carry hearts
and minds which are habitually closed TO all
religious and quiekening feeling it is small
fault of the preacher that they don't 90 home
in glow of divine enthusiasm. Nine times
out of ten it is the individual members of
church or a society who are at fault, and not
its minister, when complaint is made of dead
ness and decay. Once let the vital principle
of individual responsibility be recognized.
and the members of any religious organiza-
ton begin to show themselves quick and re-
ceptive, and the question whether or not that
society has the right kind of a minister will
settle itself speedily. And probably the min
lister will stay.
One thing more is true. The pulpit is not
the place for discussion of secular subiec53
or to beat over again the wel-threshed straw
of the latest timely" topic. We do not in
the least mean by this that the preachers
field is not as broad as the world; for it sure
ly is. 1t is good and fitting thing for the
pulpit to try to find the moral and religious
lesson in any subject of passing interest as
for instance was done last Sunday by the
Bratteboro ministers who are reported in
our columns to-day, But when the preacher
seeks first of all to be Timely" when he
makes it his practice to take for his theme the
latest thing that men are talking about, he
cheapens his high calling, he makes of the
Sunday service the very thing that it should
not be, and in the end his pulpit work will
degenerate into weak sensationalism. Bet.
ter for him and his people IT, instead, he new
er touched upon a "timely" topic, but fol-
lowed in the steps of the old French cure
whose story has been so delightfully."- told,
who preached over and over to his little flock,
through long lifetime, on the one theme.
Little children, love one another"
Men need the Sunday service to call them
back to their true selves, to quiet for little
space the turmoil Of daily life, to remind
them of the eternal verties of God, to bring
them to repentance for their sins and uplift
them to renewed hold on a better life.
When they realize this they will 90 to church
When they do not they will stay at home, and
by and by they will wake up, with the eternal
law of retribution upon them, 10 find how
helpless they have grown in the bonds which