The Gleam (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: YEARS OF WANDERING Then followed several years of wandering, desultory and unprofitable. Memory takes me for a brief time to an upper room over a public building where a small group of United Presbyterians met. It left no discoverable deposit in my mind. Then I found myself for two years accompanying my father to the Episcopalian church. This was a self-exacted penance on his part for having made light of a younger brother, who was about to take orders in the Episcopalian church, when the youth was drowned. To make a tardy reparation for his scoffing, my father united himself with the church he had so harshly criticised, and I dutifully attended him. At first I was deeply interested in the comprehensive way that the Book of Common Prayer covered every possible need of mankind. It was a pleasure to see that all conceivable disaster, misfortune, or event had been ingeniously anticipated and provided for. But the recurrent responses of the Litany teased my ear, just as a too-obvious, recurrent rhyme in poetry has always done; and before many months my attention roved from thebeautiful but monotonous liturgy to interesting observations of the way my neighbors conducted themselves at prayers. There was one loudly insistent voice?a woman's, of course?that rose above and preceded all others. She was of an up and doing temperament that would brook no dawdling before the Lord, and she tried to set a livelier pace by finishing any given sentence at least eight words in advance of the drowsy congregation. I can only guess what a quick-step she would have made of the Doxology or the benediction, if she had worked her will. I have visited churches in many cities, and I believe every congregation furnishes exponents of energetic worship. Is church discipline a dead letter, or how does it ...