p. 557 | Smoking and Chewing by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 10, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 35.

Smoking and Chewing.

By Editor

"If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." John 8:36. "And the truth shall make you free." John 8:32.

ARE tobacco smokers and chewers free? Alas, there are but very few forms of bondage so galling as that of the tobacco consumer. How many of them often make the sad confession, "I would give up the habit if I could." Is this gospel freedom? Is this liberty from enslaving habits? Verily not. An old man, who had borne an irreproachable character up to the age of seventy-two, was lately brought before one of the tribunals of Paris for stealing a piece of lead worth eight cents. He admitted that he was wholly without means, and for the first time in his life knew not where to find a single sous; but it was not hunger that drove him to steal. After considerable questioning on the part of the judge as to what could be stronger than hunger, he confessed it was tobacco for his pipe. "Tobacco, monsieur judge!" said he growing violent. "I have the misery to be a hopeless smoker! I smoke at waking; I smoke while eating; I cannot sleep without smoking till the pipe falls from my mouth. Tobacco costs me six cents a day. When I have none I am frantic. I cannot work, nor sleep, nor eat. I go from place to place raging like a mad dog. The day I stole the lead, I had been without tobacco twelve hours! I searched the day through for an acquaintance of whom I could beg a pipeful. I could not, and resorted to crime as a less evil than I was enduring. The need was stronger than I!"

So fearfully enslaving is the habit that its victims when deprived of the weed for a while, will do almost anything to get a quid, or pipeful of tobacco. A brute in human form, named William Biddlescombe, was convicted by a magistrate at Portsmouth, England, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment for skinning a living small terrier dog, and his only assigned reason for his cruelty was that he wanted the skin for a tobacco pouch!!!

"The Danes," writes the Brussels correspondent of the Irish Times, "are passionately fond of smoking. The punishment of death cannot be inflicted upon Danish criminals unless they confess their crimes; and the withholding of tobacco is said to frequently lead to an acknowledgment of guilt; and, indeed, on some occasions to this confession when the accused are really innocent, because the beloved weed is then no longer denied them. We have heard," continues the writer, "of men dying for their country, for their creed, for their love, but it is strange to hear of martyrs to a deleterious plant."

Said a young man, "I believe my pipe does me harm; I feel it is injuring me; but were I certain that it would curtail my life by fifteen years, I could not give it up"!! How distressing to hear such a statement from a free-born son of Britain! "I am a slave to tobacco," says a lawyer, "and I will give a hundred dollars to be told how to get rid of it without killing me"! "I have resolved a thousand times to be free," says another, "but I am still a slave, a hopeless slave"! A deacon on his death-bed, made the following painful statement: "I thank God, that as my last sickness has now come, I shall get rid of my hankerings for tobacco!" The Rev. George Trask writes: "I have known men to dream and rage about tobacco as madmen, when deprived of it. I have known men so enslaved, that use it they would in parlors, in churches, in temperance meetings, in defiance of all remonstrance, in defiance of all decency. And one lodge of the Sons of Temperance (?) as I certainly know, passed a resolution that they would not lay aside their tobacco even during the hour they were convened for temperance purposes. I have known a temperance lecturer of great distinction positively refuse to lecture until he had been furnished with a pipe of tobacco to screw his nerves up to the point of eloquence. I know an excellent clergyman who assured me that he had sometimes wept like a child when putting a quid of tobacco in his mouth, under a sense of his degradation and bondage to this filthy habit. I saw a man who told me that tobacco was the dearest thing he had on earth—dearer than wife, child, Church, or State!"

"I can name a clergyman who was much enslaved to his snuff; he sometimes reproved a neighbor who was a drunkard. At length the drunkard said to him, 'If you will give up your snuff, I will give up my rum.' The bargain was made. But within forty-eight hours the clergyman was in perfect anguish for his snuff. He set a spy over the drunkard to watch for his downfall. When told that the fatal cup had passed his lips, he flew to his snuff-box with the fury of a maniac, made himself idiotic, and died a fool! Tell us which was the greater drunkard? Or, as sin is the point in debate, which was the greatest sinner? Dear sir, we said to a brother clergyman, do, I pray you, give up tobacco. 'Not I, not I,' was his reply, 'I will use it if it shortens my life seven years. I will live while I live.' If this is not slavery, what is slavery? Is it not a sin to practice a habit which makes an abject slave? An eminent minister, once said, 'I would lay down one hundred pounds gladly at any time if I could give up smoking!' A woman in Essex County, a Christian professor, called for her snuff-box in her dying agonies, on the verge of eternity! weeping friends witnessed her passion strong in death! Her last words were 'nuff, nuff, give me nuff!''"

"To all who are enslaved by this habit and say they would give up their weed if they could, let me give the following remarks from the author of 'Confessions of an Old Smoker:' Besides, brethren, permit a word of friendly expostulation on this unmanly, puerile state of mind which contents itself with wishing that you could (!) abandon the use of tobacco! Proh pudor! What a confession of mental and moral weakness. You wish to give up the practice, but you cannot; of course you know the distinction between natural and moral inability; but if you have forgotten it, I must refer you to your old friend and my old friend, John Howard Hinton, for a full and satisfactory explanation of the difference between a depraved disposition and a want of power. That veteran polemic will tell you that your disposition is wrong; and that you have all the power necessary to enable you to do the deed. The fact is, you do not want to give up tobacco; you like it too well to make the sacrifice. You could do it this moment if you would, but your will is wrong, and, therefore, the sacrifice is not made; you are in bondage to a habit, a mere habit, and you have not the resolution to break the chains, and assert your freedom. This is the plain truth, and you know it. Do not then attempt to impose upon yourselves by inaccuracies of speech. Your 'I cannot' means 'I will not.'"—Rev. A. Sims.

WHAT business is that which is diametrically opposed to every clergyman, the standing dread of every mother, the constant fear of every father, the horror of every wife, which makes ninety per cent of the business of criminal courts, ninety per cent of the pauperism for which the tax-payers have to pay, which keeps employed an army of policemen in all our cities, which puts out the fire on every hearth, and condemns wives and children to rags, cold and hunger, which fosters vice for profit, and educates in wickedness for gain? The saloon business!—Lever.