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The Deaf Shoemaker: To Which Are Added Other Stories for the Young cover

The Deaf Shoemaker: To Which Are Added Other Stories for the Young

Chapter 33: THE YOUNG MAN WHO WENT TO SLEEP IN CHURCH.
By Philip Barrett
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About This Book

A collection of short moral and religious tales and sketches aimed at children and young people, offering narratives and reflections that illustrate Christian virtues such as courage, patience, repentance, and charity. The pieces combine anecdotal episodes, devotional meditations, hymnic passages, Sabbath-school addresses, and practical sketches for young men, using everyday domestic incidents and occasional heroic examples to teach right conduct. The book is organized as many brief, self-contained items intended to instruct, encourage faith, and prompt moral reflection.

THE YOUNG MAN WHO WENT TO SLEEP IN CHURCH.

“When to the house of God we go
To hear His word and sing His love,
We ought to worship Him below
As saints and angels do above.”

There is but one instance mentioned in the Bible in which a person went to sleep during religious service. It was at night. Paul, the eloquent preacher, with his usual burning zeal and strong enthusiasm, had enchained the attention of his audience till a late hour—12 o’clock. On the morning he was to leave them, His hearers were hanging with deep sorrow on his parting words, for they felt “they should see his face no more.” There was, doubtless, many a quivering lip, many a tearful eye, many a throbbing heart.

In the midst of such a scene, beneath the preaching of so gifted, so talented a man as Saul of Tarsus, there sat a young man unmoved by the tears of the listeners, unaffected by the sermon of the minister. Deep sleep fell heavily upon his slumbering eye-lids; his dull ear was closed against the touching appeals of the fervent speaker.

The house was no doubt crowded; for the young man was sitting in a window; “and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead.” (Acts xx. 19.)

Sleeping, slumbering souls in the church of God, beware least you fall asleep and be taken up dead!