The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-05-18
THE ONLY HOTEL CHAPLAIN.

THE ONLY HOTEL CHAPLAIN. HE HAS MANY STRANGE DE-
 HANDS FoR HIS SERVICES.
 Four Weddings Week His Average
 Many Requests for Prayers and Sick
 Visitations--His Parish Takes in All
 Strangers and His Work is Steadily
 Growing. ts s+
 The weekly hotel religious service was being held at the Gilsey House. The assemblage smaller than usual and numbering about fifty persons, inclu- ded about thirty men and women, who came in at the visitors entrance solely to attend the service. Their speech, dress and actions betrayed that they were not New Workers and also that they were not staying at that particu- lar hotel. #~ az
 Undoubtedly explained the chap lain, they are stopping at other hotels and boarding houses and seeing the meeting advertised, preferred coming here to going to a church. Unfortu- nately, there are people who have a prejudice against churches.''
 Down in the lobby, within sound of the singing and the exhortation was 8 group of men with and without tooth picks, who listened placidly, stretched comfortably in easy chairs. s. NO church for nine,'' commented one, keeping time with his foot to the strains of T Need Thee Every Hour, which foated down the stairs, 'sbut this isn't half bad"
 Over the banisters of the floor above the rotnllda where. the meeting was held hung 8 score of persons, mostly employees, who stuck faithfully to their post so long as the musical part of the programme was going on. Seated cir cumspectly in rows before an. impro- vised pulpit was an audience which, when it came to a question of showing alert interest and giving attentive ear to an exposition of one of the Psalms might have given points in be- llayior to a good many of the regular church congregations. There were no stified yaWns behind the shelter of a hymn book, no surreptitious forty Winks in the cosy corner of a pew, no sly peeps at chatelaine watches.
 Yet the service which began at half past eight o'clock, lasted till nearly ten and neither the music nor the preach < ing was of higher class than can be had in the average New York church.
 Ut certainly proves that there are people who would rather attend a reli- gious service in a hotel than in a church, remarked one woman to an other, on her way out--a statement corroborated by the Rev. Dr. Henry Marsh Warren, chaplain of the New York hotels, founder and originator of the hotel chaplaincy movement and of the Sunday evening religious services at many of the city hotels which were begun last fall. v .~
 Who but the infirm and aged will care to attend services in a hotel par Tor, when within a stones throw of al- < most any hotel are imposing churches equipped with comfortable pews, a paid choir and a more or less celebra- ted preacher?" remarked the sceptics when the first hotel service ever held in New York was announced to take place on a certain night last November in the Hotel Belleclair. Even the chaplain himself had some misgivings as to whether taking the mountain to Ma honlet would meet with Mahomet's ap- probation. E.
 The hotel Sunday services were not started to benefit primarily the infirm and aged This point was made clear in a talk with Dr. Warren. The doc tors official title is hotel chaplain and pastor of the parish of All Strangers q parish, he admits, which offers a tre- mendous diversity of needs, as well as unparalleled opportunities for hard work. And Dr. Warren is the very man for tlie place, his friends say.
 He was born in a hotel and brought in a hotel managed by his mother, who was early left a widow, until be began his seminary life, so he has a larger acquaintance among hotel peo- pie than perhaps any other man of the cloth in this or any other city.
 No one, consequently, knows better than he that the elastic meal hours and irregular habits born of hotel life are far from being promoters of regular church going habits, and that the av- craze hotel dweller is seldom keen about attending church anyway. The hotel habitue breakfasts too late to at tend morning service and dimes at an hour which prohibits betting to church at 8 D. m.
 This, the doctor says, applies to resi- dent New Workers more than to the strangers, who, limited for time, often improve their stay in town to hear and see the church as well as the theatrical celebrities.
 There are about a quarter of a mill lion persons who sleep every night in < the New York hotels" said Dr. War ren. Many of these preferably make their homes in family hotel, but the majority are birds of passage, here for a few months, weeks, days or hours as the case may be, and all represent q