TALMAGE'S LAST CIGAR

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 25, 1876

FromThe Review and Herald, Review and Herald, Vol. 47, No. 21.

TALMAGE'S LAST CIGAR.

After giving his experience with his first cigar in boyhood, Mr. Talmage speaks thus of his deliverance from the vile habit:

“But how about my last cigar? It was three o’clock Sabbath morning in my western home. I had smoked three or four cigars since tea. I thought I was getting the inspiration from above, but was getting much of it from beneath. My hand trembled along the line, and, strung up to the last tension of nerves, I finished my work and started from the room. A book standing on the table fell over, and, although it was not a large book, its fall sounded to my system like the crack of a pistol. As I went down the stairs their creaking made my hair stand on end. As I flung myself on a sleepless pillow, I resolved, God helping, that I had smoked my last cigar, and committed my last sin of night study. I kept my promise. With the same resolution went overboard tea and coffee.”

“That night I was born into a new physical, mental, and moral life. Perhaps it may be better for some to smoke, and study nights, and take exciting temperance beverages; but I am persuaded that if thousands of people who now go moping, and nervous, and half exhausted, through life, down with ‘sick headaches,’ and rasped by irritabilities, would try a good dose of abstinence, they would thank God for this paragraph of personal experience, and make the world the same bright place I find it, a place so attractive that nothing short of Heaven would be good enough to exchange for it. The first cigar made me desperately sick; the throwing away of my last made me gloriously well. For me the creaking of the midnight owl has ceased, and the time of the singing of the birds has come.”