Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 93, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1901 — REBUKED THE BISHOP. [ARTICLE]

REBUKED THE BISHOP.

Mountain Woman Taught Him a LeaHon in Patience. Bishop Whittle, so well known and beloved here, tells the following little story, which may serve as an object lesion for some of the nervous and irritable. "I was holding meetings in a lonely mountain district,” said the bishop. “The people were poor and ignorant, and had to come a long way to attend the services, but they usually showed up iu time. One night I was feeling sick, nervous, easily rattled. Right down in front of the crowd facing me sat a handsome young woman with a child in her arms. The child began whimpering and crying. It kept on, every minute it threatened to yell aloud, and I could not fix my attention on the audience for its wailing. Every word I uttered was punctuated by a cry or gasp, and finally I became so rattled that I could endure It no longer. ’Madam,’ I skid, addressing the mother, ’will you not take your child out of the room, I find it useless to preach while it is making such a disturbance.’ “ ‘No, sir; I will not,’ was the reply. T have carried this child four miles over a rough mountain road in order to hear you to-night, and if I had patience enough to do that you should have enough to stand my child’s crying.’ “Never was I so reproved.” said the bishop. “That ignorant woman gave me a lesson I have never forgotten. The fatigue and discomfort she endured in order to hear the word of God was. a rebuke to my display of nervous irritability, and possibly the child, penned up in a close, crowded room with strange faces around it had as just cause for complaint as I.”