Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1885 — “Jonah Eaty the Whaley.” [ARTICLE]

“Jonah Eaty the Whaley.”

There is a sudden and flaming desire on the part of fashionable Christians, especially the young women, to do evangelistic work ; and certainly no fun ought to be made of those zealous girls in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church who, even though they incidentally indulged their desire to be exclusive and odd in their efforts by gathering about seventy Chinamen into the luxurious Sunday-school room of the wealthiest church in New York, are attractively earnest in the movement. Jonah’s famous fishing excursion was the subject of the lesson on the Sunday of my visit, and it required only a cursory view of the classes —the semicircle of yellow, slant-eyed, blankfaced men, gazing with manifestly greater interest on the fair teacher than on the topic of her instruction—to conclude that the swallowing of the whale by Jonah beat anything |hey had previously come across in a fmigious way. The one girl whose argument I heard was endeavoring to turn the minds of her pupils from the physical difficulties of the case to a consideration of its moral aspect, but with rather a discouragingly small degree of success. After her most laborious dissertation, one of the Chinamen, being asked if he comprehended, replied placidly. “Certainly, m’m—Jonah eaty the whaley.”—New York Cor. Utica Observer.