ten o'clock
There is much more profanity in America on Sunday than in all in the other six days of the week put together , and it is of a more bitter and malignant character than the week-day profanity , too . It is produced by the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap church-bells . We build our churches almost without regard to cost ; we rear an edifice which is an adornment to the town , and we gild it , and fresco it , and mortgage it , and do everything we can think of to perfect it , and then spoil it all by putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears it , giving some the headache , others St. Vitus 's dance , and the rest the blind staggers . An American village at ten o'clock on a summer Sunday is the quietest and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature ; but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later . Mr. Poe 's poem of the `` Bells '' stands incomplete to this day ; but it is well enough that it is so , for the public reciter or `` reader '' who goes around trying to imitate the sounds of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find himself `` up a stump '' when he got to the church-bell -- as Joseph Addison would say . The church is always trying to get other people to reform ; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little , by way of example . It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once , but which are not useful now , neither are they ornamental .