Nothing is so likely to cause a man to lose his head as the
conscious lack of sympathetic encompassment. Sometimes a single
man will upset a sermon.
I remember such a one who for many months was the plague of my
life. He had taken offense at some public utterance of mine, and
thereafter in his eyes I was _persona non grata_, a fact
which he took a sort of savage satisfaction in making manifest
in season and out of season, especially the latter.
He would seem to be deeply interested in the opening exercises,
but the moment when I rose to preach he would double up as if
in pain, or avert his face and look wistfully toward the window
as if murmuring to himself. “Oh, that I had wings like a dove,
for then would I fly away and be at rest.” And then instead
of “afflatus” I would be taken with a bad spell of “flat us.”
It does not take many such hearers to kill a man.--P. S.
HENSON, _Christian Endeavor World_.
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