Diluted Christian oratory also helped to kill the anniversaries.  The men whom we heard in our boyhood on the Broadway platform believed in a whole Bible, and felt that if the gospel did not save the world nothing ever would; consequently, they spoke in blood-red earnestness and made the place quake with their enthusiasm.  There came afterward a weak-kneed stock of ministers who thought that part of the Bible was true, if they were not very much mistaken, and that, on the whole, religion was a good thing for most people, certainly if they had weak constitutions, and that man could be easily saved if we could get the phrenologist to fix up his head, and the gymnasium to develop his muscle, and the minister to coax him out of his indiscretions.  Well, the anniversaries could not live on pap and confectionery, and so they died for lack of strong meat.

But the day of resurrection will come.  Mark that!  The tide of Bible evangelism will come up again.  We may be dead, but our children will see it.  New York will be thronged with men and women who will come up once a year to count the sheaves of harvest, and in some great building thronged from the platform to the vestibule an aroused Christian audience will applaud the news, just received by telegraph, of a nation born in a day, and sing with more power than when Thomas Hastings used to act as precentor: 

  “The year of jubilee has come;
  Return, ye ransom’d sinners, home.”

Quizzle.—­You speak, governor, of the ruinous effect of prolixity in religious service.  How long ought a public service continue?

Wiseman.—­There is much discussion in the papers as to how long or short sermons and prayers ought to be.  Some say a discourse ought to last thirty minutes, and others forty, and others an hour, and prayers should be three minutes long, or five, or fifteen.  You might as well discuss how long a frock-coat ought to be, or how many ounces of food a man ought to eat.  In the one case, everything depends upon the man’s size; in the other, everything on the capacity of his stomach.  A sermon or a prayer ought to go on as long as it is of any profit.  If it is doing no good, the sermon is half an hour too long, though it take only thirty minutes.  If the audience cough, or fidget, or shuffle their feet, you had better stop praying.  There is no excuse, for a man’s talking or praying too long if he have good eyesight and hearing.

But suppose a man have his sermon written and before him.  You say he must go through with it?  Oh no.  Let him skip a few leaves.  Better sacrifice three or four sheets of sermon-paper than sacrifice the interest of your hearers.  But it is a silly thing for a man in a prayer-meeting or pulpit to stop merely because a certain number of minutes have expired while the interest is deepening—­absurd as a hunter on the track of a roebuck, and within two minutes of bringing down its antlers, stopping because his wife said that at six o’clock precisely he must be home to supper.  Keep on hunting till your ammunition gives out.