Wayne
Tempus faciendi, Domine.
Found elsewhere on the web today:
What A Puritan Does When He Forgets His Sermon Notes
– from The Sabbath in Puritan New England by Alice Morse Earle
What A Puritan Does When He Forgets His Sermon Notes
“The great length of many of the psalms in that book was a fatal barrier to any successful effort to have good singing. Some of them were one hundred and thirty lines long, and occupied, when lined and sung, a full half-hour, during which the patient congregation stood. It is told of Dr. West, who preached in Dartmouth in 1726, that he forgot one Sabbath Day to bring his sermon to meeting. He gave out a psalm, walked a quarter of a mile to his house, got his sermon, and was back in his pulpit long before the psalm was finished.”
– from The Sabbath in Puritan New England by Alice Morse Earle