OCCUPYING THE TEMPLE
The First Sunday. The Building Itself--Its Seating Capacity,
Furnishing and Lighting. The Lower Temple and its Various Rooms and
Halls. Services Heard by Telephone at the Samaritan Hospital.
That was a great day--the first Sunday in the new Temple. Six years
of labor and love had gone to its building and now they possessed the
land.
"During the opening exercises over nine thousand people were present
at each service," said the "Philadelphia Press" writing of the event.
The throng overflowed into the Lower Temple; into the old church
building. The whole neighborhood was full of the joyful members of
Grace Baptist Church. The very air seemed to thrill with the spirit
of thanksgiving abroad that day. All that Sabbath from sunrise until
close to midnight members thronged the building with prayers of
thankfulness and praise welling up from glad hearts.
Writing from London several years later, Mr. Conwell voiced in words
what had been in his mind when the church was planned:
"I heard a sermon which helped me greatly. It was delivered by an old
preacher, and the subject was, 'This God is our God,' He described the
attributes of God in glory, knowledge, wisdom and love, and compared
Him to the gods the heathen do worship. He then pressed upon us the
message that this glorious God is the Christian's God, and with Him we
cannot want. It did me so much good, and made me long so much for more
of God in all my feelings, actions, and influence. The seats were
hard, and the tack of the pew hard and high, the church dusty and
neglected; yet, in spite of all the discomforts, I was blessed. I
was sorry for the preacher who had to preach against all those
discomforts, and did not wonder at the thin congregation. Oh! it is
all wrong to make it so unnecessarily hard to listen to the gospel.
They ought for Jesus' sake tear out the old benches and put
in comfortable chairs. There was an air about the service of
perfunctoriness and lack of object, which made the service indefinite
and aimless. This is a common fault. We lack an object and do not aim
at anything special in our services. That, too, is all wrong. Each
hymn, each chapter read, each anthem, each prayer, and each sermon
should have a special and appropriate purpose. May the Lord help me,
after my return, to profit by this day's lesson."
No hard benches, no air of cold dreariness marks The Temple. The
exterior is beautiful and graceful in design, the interior cheery and
homelike in furnishing.
The building is of hewn stone, with a frontage on Broad Street of one
hundred and seven feet, a depth on Berks Street of one hundred and
fifty feet, a height of ninety feet. On the front is a beautiful half
rose window of rich stained glass, and on the Berks Street side a
number of smaller memorial windows, each depicting some beautiful
Biblical scene or thought. Above the rose window on the front is a
small iron balcony on which on special occasions, and at midnight on
Christmas, New Year's Eve and Easter, the church orchestra and choir
play sacred melodies and sing hymns, filling the midnight hour with
melody and delighting thousands who gather to hear it.
The auditorium of The Temple has the largest seating capacity among
Protestant church edifices in the United States. Its original seating
capacity according to the architect's plans, was forty-two hundred
opera chairs. But to secure greater comfort and safety only thirty-one
hundred and thirty-five chairs were used.
Under the auditorium and below the level of the street is the part of
the building called the Lower Temple. Here are Sunday School rooms,
with a seating capacity of two thousand. The Sunday School room and
lecture room of the Lower Temple is forty-eight by one hundred and six
feet in dimensions. It also has many beautiful stained-glass windows.
On the platform is a cabinet organ and a grand piano. In the rear of
the lecture room is a dining-room, forty-five by forty-six feet,
with a capacity for seating five hundred people. Folding tables and
hundreds of chairs are stowed away in the store rooms when not in use
in the great dining-room. Opening out of this room are the rooms of
the Board of Trustees, the parlors and reading-rooms of the Young
Men's Association and the Young Women's Association, and the kitchen,
carving-room and cloak-room. Through the kitchen is a passageway to
the engine and boiler rooms. In pantries and cupboards is an outfit
of china and table cutlery sufficient to set a table for five hundred
persons. The kitchen is fully equipped, with two large ranges,
hot-water cylinders, sinks and drainage tanks. In the annex beyond the
kitchen, a separate building contains the boilers and engine room and
the electric-light plants.
The steam-heating of the building is supplied by four one hundred
horse-power boilers. In the engine room are two one hundred and
thirty-five horse-power engines, directly connected with dynamos
having a capacity of twenty-five hundred lights, which are controlled
by a switchboard in this room. The electrician is on duty every day,
giving his entire time to the management of this plant. The building
is also supplied with gas. Directly behind the pulpit is a small
closet containing a friction wheel, by means of which, should the
electric light fail for any reason, every gas jet in The Temple can be
lighted from dome to basement.
For cleaning the church, a vacuum plant has been installed, which
sucks out every particle of dust and dirt. It does the work quickly
and thoroughly, in fact, so thoroughly it is impossible even with the
hardest beating to raise any dust on the covered chairs after they
have been cleaned by this process. Such crowds throng The Temple that
some quick, thorough method of cleaning it became imperative.
Back of the auditorium on the street floor are the business offices of
the church, Mr. Conwell's study, the office of his secretary and of
the associate pastor. All are practically and cheerfully furnished,
fitted with desks, filing cabinets, telephones, speaking tubes,
everything to carry forward the business of the church in a
time-saving, businesslike way.
The acoustics of the great auditorium are perfect. There is no
building on this continent with an equal capacity which enables the
preacher to speak and the hearers to listen with such perfect comfort.
The weakest voice is carried to the farthest auditor. Lecturers who
have tested the acoustic properties of halls in every state in the
Union speak with praise and pleasure of The Temple, which makes the
delivery of an oration to three thousand people as easy, so far as
vocal effort is concerned, as a parlor conversation.
Telephonic communication has recently been installed between the
auditorium and the Samaritan Hospital. Patients in their beds can
hear the sermons preached from The Temple pulpit and the music of the
Sunday services.
Compared with other assembly rooms in this country, the auditorium of
The Temple is a model. It seats thirty-one hundred and thirty-five
persons. The American Academy of Music, Philadelphia, seats
twenty-nine hundred; the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, twenty-four
hundred and thirty-three; Academy in New York, twenty-four hundred and
thirty-three; the Grand Opera House, Cincinnati, twenty-two hundred
and fifty; and the Music Hall, Boston, twenty-five hundred and
eighty-five.
But greater than the building is the spirit that pervades it. The
moment one enters the vast auditorium with its crimson chairs, its
cheery carpet, its softly tinted walls, one feels at home. Light
filters in through rich windows, in memory of some member gone before,
some class or organization. Back of the pulpit stands the organ, its
rich pipes rising almost to the roof. Everywhere is rich, subdued
coloring, not ostentatious, but cheery, homelike.
Large as is the seating capacity of The Temple, when it was opened it
could not accommodate the crowds that thronged to it. Almost from the
first, overflow meetings were held in the Lower Temple, that none
need be turned away from the House of God. From five hundred to two
thousand people crowded these Sunday evenings in addition to the large
audience in the main auditorium above.
The Temple workers had come to busy days and large opportunities. But
they took them humbly with a full sense of their responsibility, with
prayer in their hearts that they might meet them worthily. Their
leader knew the perils of success and with wise counsel guided them
against its insidious dangers.
"Ah, that is a dangerous hour in the history of men and institutions,"
he said, in a sermon on the "Danger of Success," "when they become too
popular; when a good cause becomes too much admired or adored, so that
the man, or the institution, or the building, or the organization,
receives an idolatrous worship from the community. That is always
a dangerous time. Small men always go down, wrecked by such dizzy
elevation. Whenever a small man is praised, he immediately loses
his balance of mind and ascribes to himself the things which others
foolishly express in flattery. He esteems himself more than he is;
thinking himself to be something, he is consequently nothing. How
dangerous is that point when a man, or a woman, or an enterprise has
become accepted and popular! Then, of all times, should the man or the
society be humble. Then, of all times, should they beware. Then, of
all times, the hosts of Satan are marshaled that by every possible
insidious wile and open warfare they may overcome. The weakest hour in
the history of great enterprises is apt to be when they seem to be,
and their projectors think they are, strongest. Take heed lest ye fall
in the hour of your strength. The most powerful mill stream drives the
wheel most vigorously at the moment before the flood sweeps the mill
to wildest destruction."
Just as plainly and unequivocally did he hold up before them the
purpose of their high calling:
"The mission of the church is to save the souls of men. That is its
true mission. It is the only mission of the church. That should be its
only thought. The moment any church admits a singer that does not sing
to save souls; the moment a church calls a pastor who does not preach
to save souls; the moment a church elects a deacon who does not work
to save souls; the moment a church gives a supper or an entertainment
of any kind not for the purpose of saving souls--it ceases in so much
to be a church and to fulfil the magnificent mission God gave it.
Every concert, every choir service, every preaching service, every
Lord's supper, every agency that is used in the church must have the
great mission plainly before its eye. We are here to save the souls of
dying sinners; we are here for no other purpose; and the mission of
the church being so clear, that is the only test of a real church."
The thousands of men and women Grace Church has saved and placed in
paths of righteousness and happiness, show that it has nobly stood
the test, that it has proved itself a church in the true sense of the
word.