Christian Bullets by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 20, 1875

Christian Bullets.

By Uriah Smith

From an article in The Methodist of May 8, 1875, entitled “Clerical Inventors,” it appears that a clergyman was the inventor of the percussion cap which has wrought such a revolution in the use of fire-arms. It says:—

“Among these inventions of clerical origin are some that . . . have changed the relations of nations, and swerved them from what a century since was apparently their predestined course. This latter has been accomplished in a remarkable degree by the substitution, in fire-arms, of fulminate igniting by percussion, in place of the old flint lock. Its inventor was the Rev. John Alexander Forsyth, ‘minister of Belhelvie,’ a parish in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and its date early in the year 1807.”

This invention made the revolver capable of successful use, of which the article in question says:—

“Although a clergyman thus enabled the revolver to be made a practical success, there is nothing to show that its original inventor belonged to the cloth, or even that he was a church member; but that he was keenly alive to religious and theological differences is manifest from the fact that in his specification he sets forth expressly that the construction of the revolving arm ‘and of the bullets may be varied, some for shooting square bullets against Turks, others for shooting round bullets against Christians,’ but the reason of this special adaptation of projectiles to Moslem and orthodox does not appear.”

These, to say the least, are curious facts in the history of fire-arms. Why a round bullet is any better adapted to a Christian than a square one would puzzle the present generation to determine. U. S.