There is, for instance, the coughing brigade.  If any individual right ought to be maintained at all hazards, it is the right of coughing.  There are times when you must cough.  There is an irresistible tickling in the throat which demands audible demonstration.  It is moved, seconded and unanimously carried that those who have irritated windpipes be heard.  But there are ways with hand or handkerchief of breaking the repercussion.  A smothered cough is dignified and acceptable if you have nothing better to offer.  But how many audiences have had their peace sacrificed by unrestrained expulsion of air through the glottis!  After a sudden change in the weather, there is a fearful charge made by the coughing brigade.  They open their mouths wide, and make the arches ring with the racket.  They begin with a faint “Ahem!” and gradually rise and fall through all the scale of dissonance, as much as to say:  “Hear, all ye good people!  I have a cold!  I have a bad cold!  I have an awful bad cold!  Hear how it racks me, tears me, torments me.  It seems as if my diaphragm must be split.  I took this awful bad cold the other night.  I added to it last Sunday.  Hear how it goes off!  There it is again.  Oh dear me!  If I only had ‘Brown’s troches,’ or the syrup of squills, or a mustard plaster, or a woolen stocking turned wrong side out around my neck!” Brethren and sisters who took cold by sitting in the same draught join the clamor, and it is glottis to glottis, and laryngitis to laryngitis, and a chorus of scrapings and explosions which make the service hideous for a preacher of sensitive nerves.

We have seen people under the pulpit coughing with their mouth so far open we have been tempted to jump into it.  There are some persons who have a convenient ecclesiastical cough.  It does not trouble them ordinarily; but when in church you get them thoroughly cornered with some practical truth, they smother the end of the sentences with a favorite paroxysm.  There is a man in our church who is apt to be taken with one of these fits just as the contribution box comes to him, and cannot seem to get his breath again till he hears the pennies rattling in the box behind him.  Cough by all means, but put on the brakes when you come to the down grade, or send the racket through at least one fold of your pocket-handkerchief.

Governor Wiseman went on further to say that the habits of the pulpit sometimes annoyed him as much as the habits of the pew.  The Governor said:  I cannot bear the “preliminaries” of religious service.

By common consent the exercises in the churches going before the sermon are called “preliminaries.”  The dictionary says that a “preliminary” is that which precedes the main business.  We do not think the sermon ought to be considered the main business.  When a pastor at the beginning of the first prayer says “O God!” he has entered upon the most important duty of the service.  We would not depreciate the sermon, but we plead for more attention to the “preliminaries.”  If a minister cannot get the attention of the people for prayer or Bible reading, it is his own fault.  Much of the interest of a service depends upon how it is launched.