Sideshow

Preachers sometimes have difficulty thinking up novelties to hold the lapsing attention of their congregations. For each Sunday and for intervening occasions they must put together a sermon. Relatively few pastors have the fecundity of ideas or the leisure to discourse with originality on current topics. They go to their ministerial trade magazines* for live sermon subjects. Their home-town topics often furnish a grain that grows to much verbiage. World news gets a parochial interpretation. Awkwardly pithy sermon topics are advertised on bulletin boards, in the dailies: "A Soul Surgeon." "The Man Who Begins at the Bottom," "Palestine for the Jew--Why?" "Christ's Similes," "Buying the Church," "Washington--the Christian Patriot," "Devilish Abuse of Holy Scriptures," "Tempting God." Forums are instituted and visiting lecturers are touted: "Billy Sunday," "The Alliance Gospel Colored Quintet."

Play actors are usually avoided because of their ancient reputation for profaneness, for their old exclusion from the temples. But even religious congregations are moved and interested by dramatic portrayals. In medieval times, for the ignorant population, Bible stories were acted out. The Feast of Asses was one such, telling the story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and Balaam's trip with the princes of Moab. Three braying asses in a church at one time was a hilarious sight to those Middle Age rustics, so conventionally pious. The feast became one of jovial riotousness. Other similar ones existed: The Feast of the Subdeacons, The Abbot of Liesse, The Lord of Misrule. They were finally ordered stopped, persisted for a while sub rosa, faded away with the oncoming of tribulations and seriousness. In England the mischievous choir boys put on simple playlets, which in turn gave place to the interludes, like Ralph Roister Bolster and Gammer Gurton's Needle, hilarious comedies. These in turn evolved into English comedy.

Of recent years religious schools and church side-organizations have taken to dramatics--of a supposedly esthetic cast. Once in a while they have put on one with a religious subject. The pastors have caught at such theatrical interest, have tried to act out on their platforms certain Bible stories, But they have been so awkward, so grotesque in their gesticulations that the editors of one magazine* printed for ministers, one of large circulation, have stopped printing the scripts of such church skits.

Such tendency to theatricalize the Bible and such eagerness for novelty in the pulpit are doubtless what drew 1,000 ministers of many denominations from Manhattan, from Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport, Conn., from Newark, Jersey City, Trenton and Camden, N. J., and from elsewhere to Manhattan last week for a special matinee of The Jazz Singer. This is a mediocre play on the boards since last fall (TIME, Sept. 28, THE THEATRE). It relates how the son of a Jewish cantor (synagog psalm-chanter)/- joins a theatrical troupe as a black-face comedian against the wishes of the parent, how at the father's death the boy gives up his longed-for career to wail Israel's woes before the Sepher Torah (scroll of laws). George Jessel, onetime big-time vaudevillist, plays the son somewhat stiffly, haltingly, yet to the seeming satisfaction of audiences who appreciate anything that holds the Jew in no contempt.

At this special matinee there was unusual quietude in the theatre before the curtain went up. Ushers were surprisingly courteous, refused in the main the few tips offered, moved with a vicarious sanctity, hoped thereby for condonation for sins committed, planned or guarded against by a wilful ceinture de chastite. Pleasant greetings passed from pastor to pastor. Dr. William Bell Millar, General Secretary of the N. Y. Federation of Churches since 1921 and instigator of this coming together, was there. So too Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman, pastor of the Central Congregational Church, Brooklyn, and Dr. Christian Fichthorne Reisner, pastor of Chelsea Church, Manhattan. Actor Jessel and his support walked through the play, mouthed their parts. The final curtain dropped. Then 37 ministers in the audience rose, asked Mr. Jessel to come and talk from their respective pulpits.

*Federal Council Bulletin, The Homiletic Review, The Expositor, Moody Monthly, etc.

*The Expositor.

/-Josef Rosenblatt is the world's most famed cantor, has a voice of really operatic quality, refuses to commercialize it, yet last year had to play the Keith circuit to get money to pay debts forced upon him by the derelictions of another. Black-face Al Jolson is a cantor's son.