Oh, I ought to have gone to church!  The bustle of the rising congregation reaches my ears.  They are standing up to pray.  Could I bring my heart into unison with those who are praying in yonder church and lift it heavenward with a fervor of supplication, but no distinct request, would not that be the safest kind of prayer?—­“Lord, look down upon me in mercy!” With that sentiment gushing from my soul, might I not leave all the rest to him?

Hark! the hymn!  This, at least, is a portion of the service which I can enjoy better than if I sat within the walls, where the full choir and the massive melody of the organ would fall with a weight upon me.  At this distance it thrills through my frame and plays upon my heart-strings with a pleasure both of the sense and spirit.  Heaven be praised!  I know nothing of music as a science, and the most elaborate harmonies, if they please me, please as simply as a nurse’s lullaby.  The strain has ceased, but prolongs itself in my mind with fanciful echoes till I start from my reverie and find that the sermon has commenced.  It is my misfortune seldom to fructify in a regular way by any but printed sermons.  The first strong idea which the preacher utters gives birth to a train of thought and leads me onward step by step quite out of hearing of the good man’s voice unless he be indeed a son of thunder.  At my open window, catching now and then a sentence of the “parson’s saw,” I am as well situated as at the foot of the pulpit stairs.  The broken and scattered fragments of this one discourse will be the texts of many sermons preached by those colleague pastors—­colleagues, but often disputants—­my Mind and Heart.  The former pretends to be a scholar and perplexes me with doctrinal points; the latter takes me on the score of feeling; and both, like several other preachers, spend their strength to very little purpose.  I, their sole auditor, cannot always understand them.

Suppose that a few hours have passed, and behold me still behind my curtain just before the close of the afternoon service.  The hour-hand on the dial has passed beyond four o’clock.  The declining sun is hidden behind the steeple and throws its shadow straight across the street; so that my chamber is darkened as with a cloud.  Around the church door all is solitude, and an impenetrable obscurity beyond the threshold.  A commotion is heard.  The seats are slammed down and the pew doors thrown back; a multitude of feet are trampling along the unseen aisles, and the congregation bursts suddenly through the portal.  Foremost scampers a rabble of boys, behind whom moves a dense and dark phalanx of grown men, and lastly a crowd of females with young children and a few scattered husbands.  This instantaneous outbreak of life into loneliness is one of the pleasantest scenes of the day.  Some of the good people are rubbing their eyes, thereby intimating that they have been wrapped, as it were, in a sort of holy trance by the fervor of their devotion.  There is a young