Robert Hall, the famous Baptist preacher, having once upon a time strongly denounced smoking as an “odious custom,” learned to smoke himself as a result of his acquaintance with Dr. Parr.  Parr was such a continual smoker that anyone who came into his company, if he had never smoked before, had to learn the use of a pipe as a means of self-defence.  Hall, who became a heavy smoker, is said to have smoked in his vestry at intervals in the service.  He probably found some relief in tobacco from the severe internal pains with which for many years he was afflicted.

Mr. Ditchfield, in his entertaining book on “The Parish Clerk,” tells a story of a Lincolnshire curate who was a great smoker, and who, like Parr, was accustomed to retire to the vestry before the sermon and there smoke a pipe while the congregation sang a psalm.  “One Sunday,” says Mr. Ditchfield, “he had an extra pipe, and Joshua (the clerk) told him that the people were getting impatient.

“‘Let them sing another psalm,’ said the curate.

“‘They have, sir,’ replied the clerk.

“‘Then let them sing the hundred and nineteenth,’ replied the curate.

“At last he finished his pipe, and began to put on the black gown, but its folds were troublesome and he could not get it on.

“‘I think the devil’s in the gown,’ muttered the curate.

“‘I think he be,’ dryly replied old Joshua.”

The same writer, in his companion volume on “The Old Time Parson,” mentions that the Vicar of Codrington in 1692 found that it was actually customary for people to play cards on the Communion Table, and that “when they chose the churchwardens they used to sit in the Sanctuary smoking and drinking, the clerk gravely saying, with a pipe in his mouth, that such had been their custom for the last sixty years.”

Although probably the conduct of the Codrington parishioners was unusual, it is certain that in the seventeenth century smoking at meetings held, not in the church itself, but in the vestry, was common.  The churchwardens’ accounts of St. Mary, Leicester, 1665-6, record the expenditure—­“In beer and tobacco from first to last 7s. 10d.”  In those of St. Alphege, London Wall, for 1671, there are the entries—­“For Pipes and Tobaccoe in the Vestry 2s.,” and “For a grosse of pipes at severall times 2s.”  In the next century, however, the practice was modified.  The St. Alphege accounts for 1739 have the entry—­“Ordered that there be no Smoaking nor Drinking for the future in the Vestry Room during the time business is doing on pain of forfeiting one shilling, Assention Day excepted.”  From this it would seem fair to infer (1) that there was no objection to the lighting of pipes in the vestry after the business of the meeting had been transacted; and (2) that on Ascension Day for some inscrutable reason there was no prohibition at all of “Smoaking and Drinking.”