A Singular Spectacle

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 4, 1871

A Singular Spectacle.

PAUL says that Christians are made a spectacle unto the world, to angels, and to men; 1 Cor. 4: 9; but one branch of the popular church seems to be making itself a very ridiculous spectacle to skeptics and unbelievers generally. It seems that the question has been sprung among Episcopalians, whether it is right for preachers to use their tobacco pipes during Lent! “Forgetting,” says the Tribune, “to raise the more important question whether it is right to use pipes at all, or not.” And this question threatens to provoke a long and angry discussion; in reference to which the Tribune adds:

“It is because we heartily wish the differences of the Protestant Episcopal (or ‘Catholic’) Church well adjusted; it is because we are weary of controversy about minor matters of mere ceremonial, that we deplore the introduction of a new element of debate. We believe that the ‘Episcopal’ Church, especially with the greater attention which it is recently paying to good works, might be a most useful and beneficial organization; and it is not, therefore, with much satisfaction that we open from week to week the newspapers calling themselves, or called by others, ‘Episcopalian,’ only to find endless disputes about rubrics, and genuflexions, and triune immersions, and vestments de omnibus rebus, until we have actually got down to tobacco pipes. If these things go on, there must be schism, and that at no distant day.”