SPEAKING OUT IN CHURCH.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 394, 16 September 1875, Page 4

SPEAKING OUT IN CHURCH.

A most amusing instance of spesking out in church occurred some years ago in the church of a small parish in the south of Scotland. The minister, in preaching upon the story of Jonah, uttered a piece of declamatory rhetoric, to something like the following effect; —“And what sort of fish was it, my brethren, that God had appointed thus to execute his holy will ? Was it a shark, my brethren? No; it could not be a shark; for God could never have ventured the person of his beloved prophet among the teeth of that ravenous fish ! What fish was it then, my brethren? Was it a salmon, think ye ? Ah, no; that were too narrow a lodging. There’s no ae salmon i’ the deepest pule o’ a’ Tweed could swallow a man. Besides, ye ken, it’s mair natural for men to swallow salmon, than salmon to swallow men. What, then, was it ? Was it a sealion, or a sea-horse, or a sea-dog, or the great rhinoceros ? Oh, no ! These are not Scripture beasts ava. Ye’re as far aff’t as ever. Which of the great monsters of the deep was it, can you tell me ?” Here an old spectacled dame, who had an elymosynary seat on the pulpit stair, thinking that the minister was in a real perplexity about the name of the fish, interrupted him with, “ Hoot, sir, it was a whale, ye ken.” “ Out upon ye, you graceless wife that you are,” cried the orator, so enraged as almost to fly out of the pulpit at her, “ thus to take the word out of the mouth of God’s minister.”