Religion: Empty Chair

“There are several ways of bringing that empty chair into such prominence that the whole dinner will seem to revolve around it. If the means described should sound theatrical, that is only because we have come to associate LIGHT AND ITS EFFECTS with the theatre. Try throwing over the back of the empty chair some soft material in cream or old ivory. . . . Place [a light] below the chair, but so the light shines up into it. Just before the Grace is sung, switch off all the lights in the room except . . . the light which shines on the chair. Its presence will be felt throughout, even though the other lights go up again after the people are seated.”—Instructions for Golden Rule Dinners.

Such an empty chair, thus illuminated, was to stand next to that of Toastmaster John Huston Finley at a large but frugal dinner in Manhattan’s Hotel Roosevelt this week. Throughout the land were to be other empty chairs at other dinners in behalf of Golden Rule Week. Their purpose is to put people in a mood for charity.

The empty chair with its lighting effect, recommended to all Golden Rule church or community dinners, was evolved by Charles Vernon Vickrey, onetime Near East Relief worker who in 1923 invented International Golden Rule Sunday, expanded it in 1929 to Golden Rule Week, formed the Golden Rule Foundation to promote it.