p. 109 | PULPIT JOKING

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 6, 1876

PULPIT JOKING.

No exception can be taken to the counsel of Dr. John Hall, in his Yale lectures:— “A certain gravity is expected,” he said, “through a right human instinct in ministers. Not that the particular attitude of the facial muscles is of any spiritual significance, one way or the other, but men feel that when handling grave and most serious matters we ought to be serious. Did you ever see the pilot take a ship through a perilous passage? He is grave. I have seen the surgeon’s knife drawn around the limb where an error of an inch would have been a terrible mistake. He was grave. I have heard a conscientious judge weigh and set out in the utmost fullness the evidence in a murder case, as earnestly bent on putting everything fairly as if his own life depended on the issue. Any levity here would be out of place; and on the same principle, by the average of mankind, gravity will be looked for in us who deal with matters of life and death, and speak for God.”