Buffoonery in the Pulpit

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 26, 1870

Buffoonery in the Pulpit.

What can be more inappropriate, rather, more sacrilegious, than to act the harlequin in the pulpit? to entertain the people, under a profession of sacred things, with jokes and puns, and contortions, and grimaces, and all the clownish paraphernalia of low and vulgar amusement? What greater outrage could be offered to the sacred office of an ambassador for Christ? “Like people like priest,” says the prophet. What, then, must the people be with such leaders? Yet this evil has reached such a magnitude in some places as to provoke a remonstrance from the religious press. Says the Methodist of April 16, 1870:—

“In the effort to detach the pulpit from the old-time dryness and dullness, some have gone to the opposite extreme, and have sought to make the pulpit attractive by sallies of wit, laughable hits, amusing anecdotes, grotesque gestures, vile puns on sacred texts, and a general airiness more suggestive of a place of amusement than of the house of God. The old mannerisms of the pulpit are discarded, it is true; but new mannerisms are introduced which are even more offensive to good taste, and greater stumbling-blocks to usefulness. We make equal protest against whining, canting, drawling and the flippant, salesman style of preaching which would present before the people the serious truths of religion as though they were of no more consequence than dry goods or vegetables. Harlequin in the pulpit, with cap and bells, and party-colored clothes, and comical grimaces, would scarcely be more out of place than some men who have intruded themselves therein. ”

“To play the harlequin might bring as many people around the pulpit of an inferior man as an anointed genius could gather by its most masterly efforts; but while in the latter case the attentive throng would be drawn toward a purer, higher life, in the former the gaping crowd would smile and be merry, and fail to see any difference between the truths of religion and the jests of a buffoon.”