Tobacco | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 27, 1875

Tobacco.

What man, woman, or child with the least spark of grace or common good sense does not know that the habit of smoking or chewing the vile weed is beneath the very animals—the four-footed beasts, creeping things?

Spend God's money to gratify a vicious, unnatural, perverted, sensual appetite, ruinous to health of soul and body, and call it harmless! Presumption! Heaven-daring!

Tobacco makes a sot of a man, a beast—worse, tenfold. Rum and tobacco—what twin devils, what mighty agents of Satan! What multitudes fall victims to these Molochs! And yet, here is one professing godliness with a pipe or cigar in his mouth, walking or riding through the streets!

Friend, take your name from the church-book, exhort no more sinners to repentance, to flee from the wrath to come—mock God no more by your cold, formal, hypocritical prayers and false testimonies!

What! profess to be a disciple of the meek, pure, and holy Jesus, attempt to teach the rising age the way of virtue, temperance, truth, and soberness, meanwhile a slave to one of the most hateful and abominable lusts that ever degraded a mortal? Shocking! Horrible! O for a thunder-clap of God's vindictive justice from Sinai's burnings, blazing top, to ring in your besotted ear, peal on peal, to wake you from spiritual death!

Talk about great and good men bowing slaves to this appetite! False! Who believes it? Look for a moment at the expense of this sensual and worse than useless gratification.

It costs England and America a sum sufficient to support fifty thousand ministers with a salary of $1,000; or more than one hundred thousand missionaries. The students in one college pay more than $6,000 for cigars yearly. It tends to idleness, poverty, strong drink, and the whole family of vices. It tends to debility, dyspepsia, palsy, cancers, insanity, delirium-tremens, and sudden deaths. It weaves a winding-sheet around twenty thousand of our land every year.

In New York city more than twice the amount is puffed away in cigars that is expended for bread!

Some eighty diseases are traced by Doctor Shaw to the use of this vile narcotic. It injures health of body, mind, and soul. The habit is indecent—the example is pernicious on the rising youth. The expenditure is wicked. It leads to strong drink. Said a poor Indian: “I want three things: all the rum in the world, all the tobacco, then more rum. I smoke because it makes me love to drink.” The use of this poisonous drug blunts the moral sensibilities, grieves the Holy Spirit, hinders prayer. “I beseech you, as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.”

The excuses for using the dirty tyrant are numerous and frequent. One uses it for his teeth; another, for his general health; a third, for his corpulency; a fourth, for his leanness; a fifth, for a watery stomach; a sixth, to help digestion; another, because some ignorant, sottish, wine-bibbing, tobacco-chewing or smoking doctor recommends it—thus and that, till the catalogue of excuses and subterfuges is filled out.

It is a matter of devout and hearty thanksgiving to God, that the most respectable, learned, and eminently successful, of the medical faculty, with united voice, veto the “accursed thing,” and warn their patients to lay it aside forever.

As Paul said to Timothy, so say we to you, reader, “Keep thyself pure.” Be clean in your person, and be clean in your heart. But, depend upon it, you can be neither if you use tobacco.

“Where lurk ye, foul blots on our race? Still dwell ye with civilized men? Why crawl ye not into some desolate place, The lair of a wolf, or a den In the clefts of the rocks, in the desert, away From the gaze of mankind and the light of the day.” —Baptist Union.