p. 181 | As a Bishop Sees It

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 5, 1878

As a Bishop Sees It.

The Bishop of Manchester lives with his eyes open, and is also a man given to plainness of speech. In a recent sermon he took occasion to defend the clergy of the Established Church from being, as a body, “idle shepherds,” although he admitted that such existed, and frankly confessed that some were foolish, some were idle, some too fond of wasting their time in croquet-grounds and at lawn-tennis, and some of running off to the moors, or looking at the fox-hounds. But if his lordship stood up thus for “the cloth,” he did not scruple to denounce the habits of worshipers at fashionable churches, where he said, “magnificently dressed ladies walked with a mincing gait up the center aisle, sometimes with a footman preceding them carrying the hymn book, which was often too large and heavy for their dainty hands, and where they drew off their beautifully-fitting kid gloves, and placed their eau-de Cologne before them, for fear their delicate nerves and sensibilities should be overcome by the heat of the building. They looked to the right hand and to the left so as to see whether their friends and neighbors were present, with whom to have a pleasant chat on the way home, and so they prepared themselves for the worship of God, their Saviour, their Sanctifier.”