Not Food but Poison by Sel.

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 21, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 40.

Not Food but Poison.

By Sel.

TOBACCO manifests no characteristics of a food. It is a rank vegetable poison. It cannot impart to the blood an atom of nutritive matter for building up the body. In those not accustomed to it, it produces faintness and horrible sickness, yet young men persevere in the use of it until they can endure it, and then until they love it. It produces various functional disturbances on the different organs of the body, causing irregular action of the heart, confusion of vision and sound. Another peril follows in the wake of this habit. It causes a thirst and depression which not unfrequently find relief in the wine cup, which first excites and then impairs self-reliance, and thus undermines the basis of truthfulness, of private and social enterprise, of manly courage and generosity. Moral cowardice, the chief reproach of our generation, has more to do with the tyranny of the poison-vice than with the despotism of social prejudices.—Sel.