When the Deacon 
 Talked in Church 
 
 
 
 GERI oR EE ROE ET EN [7 
 
W. hen the Deacon Talked in Church 
 
 
 
 We were not expecting anything unusual that 
 day, but we got it just the same. It was a warm 
 Sunday in June, and the annual foreign missionary 
 sermon was to be preached and the collection 
 taken. That didn’t excite us any, for we had 
 slept, I may say through both sermon and collec- 
 tion many a time before. It wasn’t the sermon 
 either, for that didn’t seem so different from us- 
 ual, but that somehow it just happened to come 
 
 home to the deacon. So far as I remember, the 
 preacher took for his text that verse about “Go 
 
 ye into all the world and preach the gospel to 
 every creature,” only he dwelt considerably upon 
 the “Go ve.” He said it didn’t say anything about 
 _ taking up a collection, but it did say to go, and 
 the Lord would never be satisfied until we went. 
 
 Our collections, anyway, he told us, didn’t 
 amount to much and always reminded him of the. 
 story he had heard of a little boy. It seems the 
 little fellow was saving some of the best meat on 
 his plate for his dog. ‘The mother noticed that 
 and told him to eat that himself, and. after dinner 
 he could take what was left on his plate and give 
 to the dog. So after dinner he picked up the bits 
 of fat, bone, and gristle that were left and took 
 them out to the dog, and some one heard him 
 say sadly: “I meant to bring you an offering, 
 Fido, but I’ve only got:a collection.” 
 
 Well, it did kind of hit home, for most of us 
 hadn’t been giving much of a collection, only 
 
 2 
 
OO 
 
 just enough to look respectable when the plate 
 passes. . 
 
 But the preacher went on until he showed us 
 that the command, “Go YE,’ meant just what it 
 said, that we had to go. He told us that every- 
 body had to go. Now, I had always thought that 
 there was some special kind of call that comes to 
 one here and another there; and when they felt 
 that they had to be a missionary. But he said 
 that was not in the Bible, that everybody was 
 commanded to go unless they had a call to stay 
 at home. And even if they had a cali to stay at 
 home, they were bound to do their best to find 
 a substitute to go for them, and to help every- 
 body to go that could. 
 
 Then he just asked: us how we would feel if 
 we had no Jesus to go to for forgiveness of our 
 sins, for help in our trials, for strength against 
 temptation, comfort in sorrow, for guidance in 
 perplexity; no Jesus to tell us how to live here, 
 and especially no Jesus to tell us about the love 
 of God and where our loved ones are when the 
 darkness of death shuts down upon them. This 
 was what made life so dark for the heathen, and 
 in our gifts we were to remember the Lord’s 
 command to us and the heathen’s need for us 
 to go. 
 
 Then he prayed a bit, and the choir didn’t sing 
 any that day, but the organ played a soft volun- 
 tary while the collection was being taken. Old 
 Deacon Bright got up to pass the plate on his 
 side. ‘The old deacon was as fine a man as you 
 could meet in a day’s journey, as good a neighbor 
 and as honest a man as ever lived—nice two- 
 
 -hundred-acre farm and a fine family, all mem- 
 
 3 
 
bers of the Church. Jim, the oldest, ran the farm, 
 Jack, the second boy, was just ready to go to col- 
 lege, and Mary had her diploma as a teacher and 
 was studying to be a nurse in the Toronto Hos- 
 pital. The mother too was just as nice a woman 
 as you could find anywhere. The old deacon had 
 been getting considerably deaf of late years, and 
 he sat alone in the front pew. I guess he got to 
 kind of dreaming over the sermon, for as he rose 
 _ to get the collection plate he began to talk to him- 
 - self, and to do it out loud: But, bless you, le 
 couldn’t hear himself, for you have to shout to 
 make him understand anything. 
 
 So, as I said, he took the plate and eda to 
 talk. As near as I remember, this is what he 
 said: “So that ‘Go ye’ means me and every one 
 of us, and this is the Lord’s plate, and what we 
 put in is our substitute and shows how much we 
 love him and how much we’d have been worth to 
 him, seeing we don’t go ourselves.” Then he got 
 to the back seat and passed the plate. Now, our 
 back seats are always full of young men; and as 
 they put their money on the plate, the old man 
 went on: “Twenty-five cents from Sam Jones. 
 My boy, you’d have been worth more than that 
 to the Lord. Ten cents from David Brown, five 
 cents from Tom Stone, and nothing from Steve 
 Jackson. Forty cents for four boys, and every 
 one of them could go too. Theyre worth six 
 hundred dollars a year te their fathers and only 
 forty cents to the Lord.” 
 
 In the next pew Mr. Allen and his family sat. 
 Mr. Allen put on a dollar for the family, and the 
 eld deacon moved away, saying, “The price of 
 ene of your dinners down town, half of that pair 
 
 4 
 
ef gloves you wear, almost as much as you spent 
 for ice cream last week, a box of candy,” were 
 the deacon’s comments as the coins fell from the 
 hands of the.Judge and family. 
 
 Then Father John Robb put in a bill rolled up, 
 Mrs. Robb put in another, Johnny Robb a little 
 envelope bulging with pennies, and Maggie helped 
 the baby to put in another little bag; and the old 
 deacon said: “God bless them!” 
 
 You may be sure we were all listening by this 
 time, though we didn’t dare turn around; and 
 there were lots of us mighty glad the deacon 
 wasn’t taking up the collection in our aisle. 
 
 John McClay’s pew came. “Worth a dollar a 
 year to the Lord and two thousand a year to 
 himself,” said the deacon. “Seventy-five dollars 
 for a bicycle and twenty-five cents for the Lord 
 don’t match, Tommy McClay.” 
 
 “Ah, Miss Eden, it looks queer for a hand with 
 a fifty-dollar ring to drop five cents in the plate.” 
 
 “A new house for yourself and an old quarter 
 for your Lord, Alex. Bovey?” 
 
 “You take in washing and can give five dollars 
 to the Lord! God bless you, Mrs. Dean. What? 
 Minnie has some, too, and wee Robbie?” 
 
 “Fifty, seventy-five, eighty-five, ninety. Ah, 
 your dinner will cost more than you have given, 
 Mr. Steele.” 
 
 “A bright, new dollar bill, and spread out too. 
 Mr. Perkins, I am afraid ninety-five cents was for 
 show.” 
 
 “A check from Mr. Hay. It will be a good one 
 too, for he gives a tenth to the Lord.” 
 
 “Two dollars from you, Harry Atkins, is a 
 
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small gift to the Lord that healed your dear 
 wife.” 
 
 “Ah, Miss Kitty Hughes, that fifty cents never 
 cost you a thought; and you, Miss Marion, only 
 a quarter, when both of you could go and L support 
 yourselves.” 
 
 “Five cents from Ae father and a cent from 
 each of the family. I guess John Hull and family 
 don’t Idve the heathen brothers very: ‘hard.” 
 
 “Ah, Mrs. McRunion, that means a good deal 
 to you.. The Lord keep you until you join the 
 good man that’s gone.” 
 
 “Charlie Baker, and you too, Effie—I doubt if 
 the Lord will take any substitute for you.” 
 
 “Nothing from Mr. Cantile? Heathens at 
 home? Perhaps you are one of them.” 
 
 “Five cents, Mr. Donald. I doubt if you'd 
 want to put that in the Lord’s hand.” 
 
 Then the old man came to his own pew, and 
 his wife put in an envelope. “Ah, Mary, my 
 dear, I am afraid that we have been robbing the 
 Lord all these years. I doubt we’d have put Jack 
 on the plate, wife. Jim, my boy, you’d be worth 
 far more than that to the Lord.” Jack and Mary 
 sat in the choir. 
 
 So it went from pew to pew till the old man 
 came to the front again, and there he stood a 
 moment, the plate in his left hand, and after 
 fumbling in his vest pocket awhile he said: “No,. 
 that isn’t enough, Lord; you ought to get more 
 than that; you’ve been very good to me.” So he 
 put the plate down, and, taking out an old leath- 
 ‘ern. wallet, counted out some bills on the plate, 
 and said: “I’m sorry, Lord, I didn’t know you 
 ‘wanted me to go, and Jim will keep mother and | 
 
“me on the farm, now we're getting old; but I 
 won't keep back Jack any longer; and Mary’s 
 been wanting to go too, only I wouldn't let her. 
 Take them both, Lord.” 
 
 Then while the old man sat down and buried 
 his face in his hands Deacon Wise jumped up 
 and said: “Dear pastor, we haven’t done our 
 duty. Let’s take up the collection again next 
 Sunday.” And a chorus of “Amens” came from 
 all over the church. 
 
 But the pastor got up, with tears in his eyes, 
 and said: “My friends, I haven’t done all I could, 
 either. I want to give more next Sunday, and I'll 
 give my boy too.” 
 
 Then we sang a hymn as we closed, but it 
 sounded different than it ever had before: 
 
 “Love so amazing, so divine, 
 Demands my soul, my life, my all.” 
 
 The organist said she believed it went through 
 the roof, and I guess the Lord thought so too. 
 
 I think that old deacon felt pretty bad when he 
 found that his day-dreaming had been done aloud. 
 And one or two felt pretty hard at first, but they 
 knew it was true. So that was what started our 
 missionary Church, and we’ve kept on ever since. 
 There have been fourteen members of our young 
 people’s society to go as missionaries in the last 
 five years—six of our best young men and eight 
 of our brightest girls. 
 
 Jack Bright? He married the organist, and 
 they are on the border of Tibet, where his med- 
 ical skill is winning a way for Christ. Mary 
 Bright married the minister’s son, and they went 
 to Africa. 
 
 7 
 
The old deacon has gone to his rest now. I 
 wish we had more like him. Jim keeps his 
 mother on'the farm yet, but she’s getting pretty 
 feeble. You’re much obliged? O, that’s nothing. 
 I’m glad to tell you. You see I have two of my 
 own boys that are in the work, one in India and 
 the other in China, and another getting ready to 
 go. My name? John Donald. You're laughing? 
 Yes, I was the one who gave only five cents that 
 day. What the old man said about putting it in 
 the Lord’s hand struck me. But I hope to give 
 the Lord a boy or a girl for every one of those 
 five cents. Even my two youngest are talking 
 about going already. You see the Lord said, “Co, 
 ye,” so we're going. Good-by.—Selected. 
 
 
 
 ® & HM. B O BOK 246, HARRISBURG, PA,