Preachers sometimes have difficulty thinking up novelties to hold the lapsing attention of their congregations. For each Sunday and for intervening occasions they must put together a sermon. Relatively few pastors have the fecundity of ideas or the leisure to discourse with originality on current topics. They go to their ministerial trade magazines* for live sermon subjects. Their home-town topics often furnish a grain that grows to much verbiage. World news gets a parochial interpretation. Awkwardly pithy sermon topics are advertised on bulletin boards, in the dailies: "A Soul Surgeon." "The Man Who Begins at the Bottom," "Palestine for the Jew—Why?" "Christ's Similes," "Buying the Church," "Washington—the Christian Patriot," "Devilish Abuse of Holy Scriptures," "Tempting God." Forums are instituted and visiting lecturers are touted: "Billy Sunday," "The Alliance Gospel Colored Quintet."
Play actors are usually avoided because of their ancient reputation for profaneness, for their old exclusion from the temples. But even religious congregations are moved and interested by dramatic portrayals. In medieval times, for the ignorant population, Bible stories were acted out. The Feast of Asses was one such, telling the story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and Balaam's trip with the princes of Moab. Three braying asses in a church at one time was a hilarious sight to those Middle Age rustics, so conventionally pious. The feast became one of jovial riotousness. Other similar ones existed: The Feast of the Subdeacons, The Abbot of Liesse, The Lord of Misrule. They were finally ordered stopped, persisted for a while sub rosa, faded away with the oncoming of tribulations and seriousness. In England the mischievous choir boys put on simple playlets, which in turn gave place to the interludes, like Ralph Roister Bolster and Gammer Gurton's Needle, hilarious comedies. These in turn evolved into English comedy.
Of recent years religious schools and church side-organizations have taken to dramatics—of a supposedly esthetic cast. Once in a while they have put on one with a religious subject. The pastors have caught at such theatrical interest, have tried to act out on their platforms certain Bible stories, But they have been so awkward, so grotesque in their gesticulations that the editors of one magazine* printed for ministers, one of large circulation, have stopped printing the scripts of such church skits.