Tobacco and Morals

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 15, 1866

Tobacco and Morals.

HABITS that degrade the body degrade the soul. A man's moral tastes will keep pace with his physical appetites. By carrying natural appetites beyond their bounds, he weakens his control over those appetites of his nature which are right in themselves, but which become vicious and immoral when suffered to overreach their appropriate limits. Again, by creating and indulging unnatural appetites, not furnished by the Creator, but contrary to Nature's laws, he may not only look for the various penalties connected with those laws, but will find a tendency downward in his appreciation of moral obligation. Licentiousness in eating and drinking prepares the way for licentiousness in other things. The effect of gormandizing, on the stomach and brain, is to call into their immediate sympathy influences that are besetting and demoralizing on the mental tastes and habits. The effect of simple or narcotic excitants on the nervous system, is to create a demand for other excitants, which can only be satisfied at the expense of moral principle, and obligations to the divine command. Those very things introduced into the stomach which fret the nerves, and corrode by sympathy, the finer feelings of the heart. By disturbing the equilibrium of physical action, they make turbid and morbid the disposition of the mind. Thus a licentious body will beget a licentious soul.

See the insanity of mind and heart produced by alcohol, even on those who do not indulge in continued intoxication. It makes a man prize his drams more than the bread that feeds the inmates of his dwelling. Not less certain is the insanity produced by tobacco. Tobacco blunts the conscience. Appetite and conscience would be at war in this affair, but conscience has lost its power; it is now seared with this scorching, scathing poison. To this form of sin its sensibilities are dead, its perceptive faculties are destroyed. The tobacco devotee knows his course is wrong. His judgment, reason, common sense, all conjoin their testimony that this is sin. Yet he heeds it not. Conscience has lost its power of utterance. It takes no cognizance of the wrong; and therefore has no call to speak. The deacon of the church, who sees, and rightly too, the sin of even moderately steeping the soul with liquor from the drunkard's cup, disciplines with godly fear his brother for his unchristian walk, but heeds not the Devil's smearings on his own polluted lips. With conscience wide awake to his brother's complicity with the weaker bane, he himself, with the stronger poison in his mouth, goes on in sin. He lifts his hand to exclude his incorrigible brother for not withholding his lips from the destroying bowl, while he himself, not conscience smitten, grinds the accursed weed between his teeth, and rolls it as a sweet morsel under his tongue.

One excitant, as before stated, creates a demand for some other excitant. This explains the origin of the fact that so many bad physical habits become associated. Tobacco prepares the way for alcohol by creating a dry, husky, parched feeling in the mouth and throat; and by creating also a sensation of faintness at the pit of the stomach. Alcohol creates a demand for tobacco, or some other excitant, in a similar way. This mutual relationship existing between these articles, makes it extremely important that when a reform is entertained in regard to any of them, all others of this associated family should also be abandoned.