The Village Shepherd
The Nature Of Sin
Sermon
The story's told, that in the 3rd and 4th centuries, out of the Germanic areas of Europe, came the custom of men disarming themselves before going into church to worship. As men entered the church they would lay their wooden clubs in a pile at the back of the church. Eventually they developed a kind of game, by rolling stones at this pile of clubs and seeing how many they could knock down. The more clubs they knocked over, the more sins the individual was believed to have left behind.
