Humor In The Pulpit

A minister not twenty miles from here preached the other Sunday evening on card playing and dancing and especially on the latter as cardinal sins. After the conclusión of his sermón which, as usual, was a red hot one, he began his prayer in the following words: "Oh Lord, we read in the daily papers that thousands of young men in Michigan are annually going to ruin." Several of his auditors wondered what daily papers the reverend gentlemaxi meant to insinúate that he and the Lord read. Another clergyman, a few miles farther away, announced that he would preach from the text "Lay not up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where moth and rust doth corrupt." It is not necessary to say that his sermón did not agree with text. A Ypsilanti clegyman announced that he would preach last Sunday on the "Political and Social Views of Christ." We have not yet been informed whether the minister thought He was a mugwump or how he believed He stood on the Hawaiian question. Politics and religión don't mix at least not in the pulpit. In this country there is a complete separation of church and state. And certainly it is not necessary that any one be of any particular political faith in order to be saved. So that it has always seemed to us that when a minister arises in his pulpit to preach politics, he places himself on the level with the stump speaker, and in his vain effort to exeuse his position he is apt to give food to irreligious minds. It was an Arm Arbor clergyman, who, when he had first started out as a minister, started to say "I want a good life,' when his tongue made him say "I want a good wife." As this was before the clergyman had secured a helpmeet, the congregation was greatly pleased with the sentence. ■ t It is hard to close this article without relating an anecdote which has probably accumulated the frosts of years. It is of a very short minister who was called as a supply to fill the pulpit of a very tall minister for a couple of weeks. The pulpit was so high that the short minister had a box placed in it for him to stand upon. He gave out his text as "A little whilë ye shall see me and then again ye shall not see me," when the box tripped over and the minister disappeared from the view Ojf his alarmed congregation. The hext time he occupied the pulpit, he put no confidence in the box only his forehead, eyes and nose appearing above the top of the pulpit, but in a great voice he gave out his text, "It is I, be not afraid."