Smoky Farces and Smoky Sermons.
Charles Lamb once wrote a farce to be acted on the stage, but it proved a failure. The next day he wrote a letter to his friend Hazlitt, in which he said: “We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces.” Lamb was right. He never uttered a truer word; and he might have added, A smoky preacher must preach smoky sermons. We have listened to sermons when one could fairly smell the tobacco smoke. Some kinds of smoke may add to the flavor of ham and bacon, but tobacco smoke certainly adds nothing to the flavor of a sermon. The only way to cure an old pipe of its indescribably offensive odor is to throw it into the fire and burn it. We would suggest the same treatment for sermons saturated with tobacco. There is a very quick way of getting rid of smoky farces, as poor Lamb found to his sorrow, when the curtain fell amid a storm of hisses; but smoky sermons kill the people, because a due respect for the day and the place will not allow the people to hiss and kill them. What a mercy if smoky sermons could be hissed out of the pulpit as quickly as smoky farces are hissed from the boards of the theater! It might bring preachers to their senses as it did Charles Lamb.—Exchange.