ook "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,"
tells how, when he first went to Danby in Cleveland--then very remote
from the great world--and had to take his first funeral, he found
inside the church the parish clerk, who was also parish schoolmaster
by the way, sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window with
his hat on and comfortably smoking his pipe. A correspondent of the
_Times_ in 1895 mentioned that his mother had told him how she
remembered seeing smoking in a Welsh church about 1850--"The Communion
table stood in the aisle, and the farmers were in the habit of putting
their hats upon it, and when the sermon began they lit their pipes and
smoked, but without any idea of irreverence." In an Essex church about
1861, a visitor had pointed out to him various nooks in the gallery
where short pipes were stowed away, which he was informed the old men
smoked during service; and several of the pews in the body of the
church contained triangular wooden spittoons filled with sawdust.

A clergyman has put it on record that when he went in 1873 as
curate-in-charge to an out-of-the-way Norfolk village, at his first
early celebration he arrived in church about 7.45 A.M., and, he says,
"to my amazement saw five old men sitting round the stove in the nave
with their hats on, smoking their pipes. I expostulated with them
quite quietly, but they left the church before service and never came
again. I discovered afterwards that they had been regular
communicants, and that my predecessor always distributed the offertory
to the poor present immediately after the service. When these men, in
the course of my remonstrance found that I was not going to continue
the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants."

Nowadays, if smoking takes place in church at all, it can only be done
with intentional irreverence; and it is painful to think that even at
the present day there are people in whom a feeling of reverence and
decency is so far lacking as to lead them to desecrate places of
worship. The Vicar of Lancaster, at his Easter vestry meeting in 1913,
complained of bank-holiday visitors to the parish church who ate their
lunch, smoked, and wore their hats while looking round the building.
It is absurd to suppose that these people were unconscious of the
impropriety of their conduct.

XV

TOBACCONISTS' SIGNS

"I would enjoin every shop to make use of a sign which
bears some affinity to the wares in which it deals."