Religion: Puffing Preachers

Of all U. S. men of God, Episcopalians are decidedly the best livers, eating, smoking and drinking as they see fit. The Catholic Church does not breed so many merry monks as some people think, but Catholic priests may smoke cigarets, take a nip now & then and let their waistlines go in middle age. In the evangelical clergy austerity prevails, and of the large evangelical denominations the one which least countenances clerical laxity is the Methodist Episcopal Church. Methodist asceticism reached its apogee in 1924 when a Methodist conference voted to insert in the Church’s Book of Discipline thefollowing: “We [ministers and laymen] . . . record our solemn judgment that the habitual use of tobacco is a practice out of harmony with the best Christian influence.”

Last week this half-forgotten judgment was dug up by Bishop Edwin Holt Hughes, of Washington, D. C., 68, president of the Methodist Board of Temperance, and brandished over the head of a Methodist conference in Seaford, Del. Asked for an opinion on smoking, Bishop Hughes warmly gave it: “If I felt that I could not live up to my obligations as minister, I would hand in my credentials and stop preaching. I would not walk up & down the streets a self-confessed liar by puffing a cigar. . . . Many ministers complain they are not getting results in their works. How can you expect God to bless a liar? . . . When any member of this conference violates his obligation not to use tobacco, you have a right to bring charges against him.”