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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 4, 1866

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 28, No. 14.

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Tobacco.

By T. Trall

EFFECT ON THE MORALS.

No truth in philosophy is better established than the fact that bodily purity and true morality hold intimate and reciprocal relations. Try if you can to entertain the idea of a gluttonous eater, a wine-bibber, or a tobacco-user, in connection with holiness of heart. There is something unnatural, revolting, repulsive, in the association. Just as the bodily appetences, and the outward senses are depraved, does the inner man, the moral nature become gross. The pure spirit will not, cannot dwell in a filthy tenement. There is a natural correspondence between material and spiritual things, so that the quality of one denotes the character of the other. Suppose some blasphemer's tongue should assert that the apostles, who in the days of our Saviour’s presence went about teaching the way of life, were addicted to the practice of chewing some nauseous weed as a means of sensuous enjoyment, would not the whole Christian world be shocked at the foul aspersion? A professor of religion and slave of tobacco may mean well, but a hallucination pervades his moral nature, exactly in proportion to the amount of tobacco he consumes. He may have an intellectual consciousness of right and wrong, but the moral sense is blunted; he does not feel duty if he sees it; nor does he feel truth as he perceives it. He may acknowledge, with all candor and sincerity, that tobacco-using is a pernicious custom, morally wrong; yet he may find an impulse within, a law of his members artificially produced, prompting him with insatiate cravings to continue the practice, and this artificial law may be stronger than his natural reason and conscience combined. Is not an infraction of any one of God's laws a transgression and a sin? And if a man habitually lives in the transgression of one of God's laws, will not the transition be easy and natural to the violation of other laws? And lastly, how can any man stand up as a moral teacher, who in his own conduct commends to his fellow-creatures a life of continual transgression against the laws of his being?—T. TRALL, in Earnest Christian.