I was preaching for a single Sabbath in Brooklyn. In the course of my discourse I lost my head; in fact, I lost all of them. Three were on paper, and one on my shoulders; and they all went at once.
I tried to remember what I had had in my head, but, like the old king's dream, the matter had gone from me.
I tried to decipher what I had put upon paper, but the writing had faded out.
Everything was gone except the audience, and I could have wished they were gone too.
I pounded the desk; I pawed the floor; I clawed the air. I poured whole broadsides of big dictionary into those long-suffering people, but without a single scintilla of sense.
At last I struck a line of thought, and clutched it with the grip of despair, and pulled myself out of the hole in which I had been floundering, and then limped along to a "lame conclusion."
And then so mortified was I that I would have sunk through the floor, could I have found a vacant nail-hole. As that was out of the question, I would fain have sneaked away without speaking to a human being; but, as bad luck would have it, I had promised to go home to dinner with the Hon. William Richardson, one of the most cultured members of the congregation.
We walked some distance before either spoke a word. Finally, I broke silence--I felt like breaking everything in sight--and I said, "Richardson, was not that the very worst you ever heard?"
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Mean?" I replied, catching savagely at the word. "'Mean' is name for it. You must have noticed how under the third head of my discourse I lost my head, and ripped and raved and tore around like a lunatic. What did the people think of it?"
"Think of it? Think of it?" he repeated with sincere surprise. "Why, they thought it was the best part of the whole sermon."
And then I said to myself, and I said to him, "What is the use of talking sense to the people when they like the other so much better?" Possibly this may serve to account for the fact that these same people subsequently called me to become their pastor.--P. S. Henson, Christian Endeavor World.
