Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · July 23, 1867

A DISGRACEFUL SIGHT.

A few days since, we saw a lot of tobacco flourishing in all its rank and nauseous growth. This, though a common sight, was disgraceful enough in itself considered; but there were other circumstances tending to render it more than ordinarily so. In the first place, it was growing in a graveyard. A person, it appears, owning a lot in the burying-ground, with a purpose to let nothing run to waste, had thought to draw therefrom a little gratification for a depraved appetite. But this was not all. The lot contained two graves. And more than this, it did not seem to be the property of a common sinner, whom we might expect to see following the world and reveling in its lusts, but of a reverend gentleman; as the gravestones proclaimed that two women lay buried there, who died within two years of each other, wives of the clergyman aforesaid. Nor are we permitted to stop here in our record; for, apparently that the space might all be utilized, and the rows of the disgusting tobacco plant not be broken, the graves were leveled off and some of the plants stood directly upon them! Strange place for such a sight! and stranger sight for such a place!! Were those women when in life so fond of tobacco that they would consider it an honor to have the vile plant draw nourishment from their ashes? We do not believe it. Rather we are to suppose that the use of the noxious weed has so depraved the living as to paralyze his moral and mental faculties, destroy all his sense of propriety, blind him to everything but the gratification of his inordinate lust, and lead him to openly proclaim his shame upon the graves of the dead. Like one of old, he is possessed of an unclean spirit that does not scruple to invade the sanctity of the tomb.

As to the tobacco itself, it would perhaps be proper enough that a weed by which so many are laid in the grave, should draw its nourishment from that sepulchral source and become a living embodiment of the charnel house; only it is an outrage upon the dead, and shocking to the sensibilities of such of the living as think that the resting places of the departed should not only be free from sacrilege, but should be treated with respect.