My last Cigar by T. DeWitt Talmage

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · Nov 11, 1875

My last Cigar.

By T. DeWitt Talmage

It was three o’clock Sabbath morning in my western home. I had smoked three or four cigars since tea. At that time I wrote my sermons and took another cigar with each new head of discourse. 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 excited system like a crack of a pistol. As I went down 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 croaking of the midnight owl hath ceased, and the singing of the birds has come.—T. DeWitt Talmage.