The Minister's Blunder

1896

The New Yorkers are telling one another of a good joke on Rev. John Wesley Brown, rector of St. Thomas' Church, previously rector of St Paul's in this city.

His part in the ceremonial of the Paget-Whitney wedding was to read the service. Either he had marked the wrong place in the prayer book or the singing disconcerted him; at any rate the wedding party was amazed to hear his rich, full voice utter the words: "I am the resurrection and the life."

"Heavens and earth!" ejaculated Bishop Potter in a whisper behind him. The rector at once awoke to the fact that he was reading the burial service, and, after one breathless second, he proceeded with the proper ritual.


1901

Old Parson Helton, a Baptist preacher, of Tennessee, had eighteen sons, and during the Civil War sixteen of them enlisted in the Union Army, and two sided with the Confederates. When the old minister had reached his eighty-eighth year, someone, who did not know about his sons' views, asked him where his sympathies lay during the war. "My sympathies were with the Union by fourteen majority," said the old man.