The ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the Opera House continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance, and sapped of their congregations churches where the Gospel was preached with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin.  It is a pity to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the Opera House at Mr. Beecher’s request, even when that incendiary was sick and disabled; and if that man’s conscience justifies him in that refusal I do not.  Under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have preached to that Opera House multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable damage to the Opera House experiment.  And he need not have been particular about the sermon he chose, either.  He could have relied on any he had in his barrel.

The Opera House meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and grew thinner, but the Opera House assemblages were vast.  Every Sunday night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the Opera House to be damned.  The community talked, talked, talked.  Everybody discussed the fact that the Ministerial Union disapproved of the Opera House meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth there.  And everybody wondered how the Ministerial Union could tell whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those clergymen had never attended an Opera House meeting, and therefore didn’t know what was taught there.  Everybody wondered over that curious question, and they had to take it out in wondering.

Mr. Beecher asked the Ministerial Union to state their objections to the Opera House matter.  They could not—­at least they did not.  He said to them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired the discontinuance of those meetings he would discontinue them.  They declined to do that.  Why should they have declined?  They had no right to decline, and no excuse to decline, if they honestly believed that those meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests of religion. (That is a proposition which the profoundest head among them cannot get around.)

But the Opera House meetings went on.  That was the mischief of it.  And so, one Monday morning, when Mr. B. appeared at the usual Ministers’ meeting, his brother clergymen desired him to come there no more.  He asked why.  They gave no reason.  They simply declined to have his company longer.  Mr. B. said he could not accept of this execution without a trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them he must insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever.  And so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man’s importunate affection.